


Driving Our Sister Insane

by Toxic_Waste



Category: Phineas and Ferb
Genre: Creative Withdrawal, Dimension Travel, Gen, Internal Conflict, Science Fiction, Temporal Paradox, Time Loop, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2018-11-30 22:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 160,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11473152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toxic_Waste/pseuds/Toxic_Waste
Summary: When Doofenshmirtz destroys The Do-Over-Inator and abandons the Tri-State Area in an attempt to give up evil, he leaves Candace as the only person in the whole city who was able to perceive the time loops - and who remembers the two brothers that she used to have.





	1. The Beginning of the End

All was still in the city of Danville as Wednesday, September 22nd drew silently to a close. The inky night sky, brilliantly accentuated by thousands of sparkling stars, hung silent and close like a blanket over the sleeping city. It was 11:52 PM - and as the clock ticked towards midnight all traffic had very nearly ceased. As the cold, pale moonlight crept over the skyline, illuminating in its soft glow the slumbering populace, with its roads deserted, its parks abandoned, all seemed well. The emergency crews, always ready to protect the inhabitants of the quiet domiciles, slept undisturbed through the night. No bells tolled, and no alarms sounded, harshly warning that somewhere, a catastrophe had, or was in the process of, occurring.

Yet, despite all appearances, not all was well within dormant township. But the issue that was plaguing this place, even through the peaceful night, was not bound to the current locale, no indeed. Although this spot was the epicenter, both the beginning and the end, it was not the only place affected. No, it was much, much bigger, affecting the universe in its entirety. And what was this massive problem, overhanging all that existed, both known and unknown with a foreboding shadow? Was there a gang of thieves or murderers planning on a nightly expedition? Was a group of terrorists planning an attack? Was another country plotting a nuclear-powered demise? No, it was nothing quite so simple. You see, put simply, originating here, in Danville, and slowly spreading all over the universe, the very fabric of existence was a risk.

Space and time itself was breaking down, as a crazy, half-cocked yet incredibly genius device, whipped up over an afternoon's time, powered by pizzazium infinionite, and held together by duct tape was preventing the progress of time. The natural laws of physics were strained to their breaking point as time attempted to flow onward, but was unable. The consequences of such a thing were disastrous. Time and space are inextricably linked, you see, and with time unable to naturally flow, space was put under enormous pressure. Time and space, the fabric of existence itself, were being slowly pulled apart like a wet paper towel. Temporal rifts had begun flashing in and out of existence, sucking up matter like a vacuum as reality was rent in twain. If something was pulled into such a rift - it was beyond both time and space, and took up a new existence, beyond existence, beyond time, and beyond space, if such a thing made sense. All traces of the object would be wiped out, from both the minds and kitchen cabinets of the population of the universe. Indeed, if you had walked into one of the many homes right now , and inquired for a spoon - you would be met with questioning gazes and clueless looks of bewilderment. Spoons were one of the first objects that had been greedily devoured by the temporal anomalies, and all proof, all memory of their existence was gone. People stirred tea with forks, and drank soup straight from their bowls. Other objects had disappeared as well - capri pants, oranges, and tigers, among others. Every so often, a rift would open, a tear in time and space, a hole in reality, and something would be taken. You could never guess what, but it was only a matter of time before everything in the universe was ravenously demolished by the rifts, before there was no matter left to seal the rifts when they opened, when they would turn on each other, and the entire space-time continuum would destroy itself, taking all that had existed in the past, existed now, and ever would exist with it. And no-one would ever realize what had happened, before it was too late and reality itself was gone.

All except two people. There had been two people standing next to the device when it was initiated, and these two people remained outside the self-destructive temporal loops that scooped up everyone and everything else. They alone could perceive the rifts, and remember the objects sucked through them. They alone were unaffected, as time itself was stuck, like a broken record, unable to proceed, resetting every twenty-four hours, and tearing the space-time continuum more and more as it was forced to loop again and again. They alone could see what was truly happening. And yet, when one of the two realized what was going on, and hastily disabled the machine he had so eagerly created, allowing time to begin flowing on again - the trouble wasn't over, not by a long shot. In fact, our story really only begins in earnest after he had done so. So what was the trouble? The world could go on without the things eaten up by the temporal rifts, right? Someone would surely reinvent the spoon, or elastic suspenders , right? Well, yes, but as one of the two would be forced to discover, what would happen if something near and dear to your hear was lost through one of the holes in the fabric of reality? What if something, say a family member you loved with all your heart, was taken through, lost in some realm beyond time, beyond space, beyond fathom? And that is the true story here.

As the clocks in Danville ticked closer and closer to midnight, all seemed still and peaceful in a certain brown-roofed, yellow house on Maple Drive. But the true situation belied all appearances. In the upper story of the house, in a room so glaringly pink that it was somehow still bright even in the pitchy blackness of midnight, the teenage Candace Flynn lay disconcerted on her bed - somewhat frightened - mulling over things in her head. Though she knew (all too well) of the imminent doom that was facing the world, and though she was not a little frightened of it, her mind was nonetheless filling with that sort of quiet resignation that merely sighs and says "Take me." At first, when the time loops appeared stable she had reacted similarly to what one might expect of a teenager who discovers that, since time is repeating, there are no lasting consequences to anything. She had done nearly everything one could in a twenty-four hour time span: and at first, it had been exiting, an adventure, one with no lasting affects on anything. She shopped for days, maxing out credit cards and breaking the bank. She tried over and over to expose her brothers' antics to her mother, albeit unsuccessfully. She drove, alone, with only a permit, at speeds far beyond the legal speed limit. But as time went on, or rather, as it didn't, and as she continuously awoke, morning after morning, on the last day of summer, it grew stale to her. What was there to do?

Nothing lasted, nothing was permanent. So, yesterday, which had also been the so called 'last day of summer' she had done the only thing left she could think of doing that had a chance of restoring time to its natural state. With a long, depressing sigh, she turned on her side in the bed, pushing her long, orange hair out of her eyes, looking disconsolately on the digital clock by her bed, its glowing numbers fast approaching midnight, signalling the dawn of a new day, a day which she now feared would never come.

She had gone to her brothers, at their usual place in the backyard. Surely, if anyone could fix the problems with space and time, it would be them, Candace had reasoned. How many times in the last month alone had she seen them treat the rock-solid rules of the universe as easily-ignored suggestions. In the past week alone, they had behaved as if the immovable laws of thermodynamics and physics were so many twigs, easily taken over ones' knee and snapped into a dozen pieces. For so many years, it had been the same way, day in and day out. Of course, Candace was seemingly the only one who could actually grasp the enormity of what they did on a daily basis. All the other participants in her brothers' schemes went along, unassuming, not realizing how many natural statutes had been ignored in their creation. But that didn't matter now. As she walked up to them yesterday, sitting in the backyard, blueprints for fantastical devices spread around them in the grass, she thought, surely, surely, they could fix it. But first she had had to convince them that time was, in fact, looping in on itself. That hadn't been as bad as it may have seemed. To Phineas and Ferb, the fact that the space-time continuum was falling apart like a bad joke was probably the least threatening end-of-the-world scenario they had run into. So they had believed her, as she thought they would. Smiling slightly despite herself as she lay on the bed, Candace's innermost self was immeasurably thankful for her brothers, and for the relationship she had with them. It wasn't the best, and indeed, they had done most of the work supporting it, but it was still there, strong and trusting. A bond forged first in the more typical fashion, and solidified in the never-ending, icy cold, soul sucking darkness of deep space.

So it was that previous days' conversation had gone well, even though it was about the end of the universe, a frightening end that only one party could percieve coming. She had raced out of bed early yesterday, and caught her brothers as they were strapping some kind of rocket-powered hovering skateboards to thier feet in the driveway, leaving blueprints scattered everywhere.  
"Phineas! Ferb!", she bellowed, dashing out the back door at them, still in her pajamas.  
At their incredulous looks, she knew they were going to point out the fact that yes, she was out of the house early, and yes she hadn't changed from her nightwear. But there was no time. So Candace interrupted them before they could even begin.

"Do you know what you are going to do today?", she asked.

Phineas shared a questioning glance other his shoulder with his brother.  
"Well, no, not yet.", he answered cheerily, though there was still a 'what is going on' tone in his voice. "We were going to fly over the Isabella's and Baljeet's and ..."

Candace hastily interrupted. "There's no time!"

Phineas opened his mouth once more, but she ignored it and went on.

"Look, I know this is going to sound crazy but there's something wrong with time. It keeps repeating, like, every morning is today, no matter what, and I'm sure I sound completely unhinged but I've lived this same day over like twenty times know and it's really getting monotonous. Plus, strange portals are opening up randomly, and sucking stuff in, and whatever they suck in completely disappears, and no one ever remembers it ever existed! Like, like, spoons and Mom's capris, and, and..." Candace stopped, gasping for breath.

"What's a spoon?", she heard Phineas ask.

"It doesn't matter!", she cried. "Just please, please build something that can look at time and see what's the matter with it." She was almost in tears. They had to believe her, they just had to. No one else would, and even if someone else did, no one else would be able to fix it.

"Alright, alright", Phineas said gently, walking over and patting her on the back. " I believe you. We will take a look at the continuum of space and time and see what's going on."

Turning to Ferb, he took a breath and announced, "Ferb, I know what we are going to do today!"

Even at the sound of those words, something in Candace's mind was comforted. Her brothers were on the case. Nature bent to their will, it always did, so she was saved.

"Candace", a voice buttered in a British accent sliced through the craziness going on inside her. She looked at her step-brother, somewhat stunned. Ferb rarely spoke more that once or twice a day, and never this early, so whatever he had to say, it was most likely important.

"If you truly are trapped outside a time loop, there's a phrase you should memorize.", he continued."Are you ready?" She nodded. "There's a tree growing on the beach. It's coconuts are out of reach. The sand around is white like bleach. You hear a bird above loudly screech."

"Oh yeah!", Phineas chimed in brightly. "That's our time travel passphrase. Ferb and I, we agreed on it in secret, so that the only way anyone could ever know it would be if they traveled through time to eavesdrop on us, or if they were us. Either way would be enough to prove that they are time travelers."

"And..." Candace deadpanned. She couldn't quite see the use of this new information, but then it dawned on her.  
"So when time loops and tomorrow is this morning again, I can tell it to you guys and you'll know that I'm a time traveler, or at least that something is up with me and time. Because you wont remember telling me!"

"Exactly, sis.", said Phineas. His phone buzzed in his pocket and he retrieved it and glanced at the number. "That's the delivery guys", he said, then paused, missing a beat. "Hey, where's Perry?"

Candace glanced around, but the lazy teal blob was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, Phineas flipped open the phone and put it to his ear. Candace could hear unintelligible murmuring from the other end of the line.

"Yes, three grams of pizzazium infinionite", Phineas said. Another pause, more murmuring, and then, "Yes, yes I am." Pause. "Alright, see you then." Turning to Ferb, he said "They'll be here in five minutes. Let's get started with our Space-Time Continuum Ripper."

Candace stood awkwardly in the garage, watching as Phineas and Ferb busily moved around, pulling stuff out and preparing to work. She couldn't help, for she didn't even slightly understand the science behind the stuff that they did.

"It's okay," Phineas said, seeing her standing and staring at them, "You don't have to wait there for us. What we are planning to do will revolutionize all understanding of about ... uh ... I'd say twenty-seven scientific fields. We'll call you when we are done. Should only take like, forty-five minutes or so."

Candace thankfully, though somewhat guiltily, turned and walked into the house. Her mom was just leaving, talking to her dad in the other room, although she knew exactly what words where passing between them.

"I've gotta run some errands", she mimicked to herself, "They never run themselves. They never do."

Sighing, she thought of breakfast. But with all spoons erased from existence, how was she supposed to eat her favorite Smile Cereal? Certainly not by slurping straight out of the bowl like soup, the way her dad had begun doing the day after spoons disappeared.  
"I'll just use a fork," she muttered to herself, stalking into the kitchen.

Outside in the backyard, she could hear the sounds of trucks pulling up, and the whine of saws, and the distinctive hissing sounds that blowtorches made. Pulling the cereal out of the cabinet and pouring it into the bowl, one thought filled her mind. Forty-five minutes just couldn't pass fast enough.

After struggling through the arduous process of eating cereal with a fork, changing into her regular clothes, and mindlessly pacing around her room, she heard Phineas' voice echo through her open window.

"Candace! We're done. You can come out now."

Leaving her messy room behind in her haste - not that it mattered either way, since time was looping, after all, she rushed through the door and into the backyard. Sure enough, sitting next to the tree, was a thirty-foot-tall metal 'Y' that was arcing thick electric bolts between the arms of the 'Y'. It was hugely massive, taller than their house, and easily ten feet thick at the base. "How do they do it?", Candace thought to herself. Even after at least six failed attempts to 'bust' her brothers on this very day (or previous iterations of it), a small part of Candace still wanted to whip out her phone and scream at their mother to get home as quickly as possible. Okay, more than a small part. But, nonetheless, she stifled that part of herself and turned to face her brothers.

"How does it work?", she asked.

"It's simple", Phineas beamed.

Just then, the fence gate behind them creaked, singling to them that it had been opened.

"Heee-y Phineas. Whatcha' doinn'?", a familiar voice said. Then, "Awww, I can't believe you guys finished it without me. What is it?"

"Oh, hey Isabella,", Phineas said, cutting off his former train of thought. "We didn't want to start without you, but Candace is stuck outside of an unstable time loop. At least, that what she says."

"It's true!", Candace exclaimed, suddenly upset that she needed to justify herself.

"Oh, I believe you," Phineas rejoined, smiling at his older sister, "But obviously you know that we cannot perceive the time loop from the inside, as I'm sure you have experienced."

Candace nodded.

"That sound serious", Isabella said, "But also cool. Can I help? I'm trying to get my "Revolutionize the Modern Understanding of Quantum Mechanics" patch today."

"Sure thing!" Phineas replied. "So, here's how this works. There's two negative mass generators powered by pizzazium infinionite that, well, generate negative mass. We set up a reverse polarity defusion device that will create a nuclear fission reaction, which should be enough to compress to negative mass into nothing - so it creates a pile of nothing, something that is tangible, has mass, takes up space, but has no weight, which we can use to bend local space-time enough to create a rift in space and time, with a powerful electrical current. Depending on the strength of the current required, we can judge the state of the space time continuum. If what Candace said about the time loops is true, and I believe her, then the square root of the current will divide evenly into this picture of a circle. If not, there will be a remainder, which will tell us how close it is to looping or not."

Candace nodded in agreement, but had no idea what he was actually talking about. She had always struggled in math - it had taken her all of three hours to solve a simple question like "What is the square root of soon?" The answer was never, of course, but the fact that it had taken her three hours and almost an entire notebook to figure that out was testament enough that her mathematical ability fell far short of her younger brothers'.

"Alright then", said Phineas, turning towards a control panel built into the base of the giant machine," Let's make like a banana and invert our molecules through the space-time continuum!"

"Hang on!", interjected Isabella, stopping to glance around behind her. Then she asked, "Where's Perry?"

"I already took care of that", Phineas said over his shoulder, punching various commands into the keyboard that had unfolded from the panel as he had drawn near.

"Oh." Isabella looked somewhat disappointed. But Candace hardly took note. She couldn't. She was about to be saved, her problems solved, and the world righted. Of course, it was her brothers that had done so again, but, who cared? She didn't. Not anymore.  
But all her hopes and dreams were cruelly shattered just a moment later as a sound carried through the backyard, causing Phineas to glance up from his post at the keyboard. It was a car horn - their mom's car horn. She had come home early.

Why had she come home early? Candace wondered frantically. She hadn't come home till much later in the afternoon on all the other times Candace had lived through this day. There could only one cause, she reasoned, obviously something must have been swallowed by the rifts, something that caused her mother to return home early because it wasn't there anymore. But of course, no one else could perceive that.

"Oh!" Phineas said excitedly, "I'm going to get Mom! She'll be super curious about the time loops too, I'm sure, and we can show her this awesome machine we've built!"

"NO!", screamed Candace, a bit louder than she intended. But she was terrified, terrified because she knew that as soon as their mom stepped foot in the backyard , the machine would disappear, as her brother's inventions always tended to do. Candace sprinted over to the machine and clung to it for dear life, reasoning in vain that maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't disappear if she was hanging on to it. But she was too late. Even as Linda Flynn-Fletcher rounded the corner of the house, a blue-green beam of light shot from the sky and struck the gargantuan metallic structure, causing it to disappear into thin air. Suddenly finding herself with only air beneath her, Candace plummeted three feet to the ground, landing squarely on her tailbone.

But the pain wasn't the only reason that tears threatened to leak from her eyes. Now that the machine was gone, she'd have to live through this rotten day again and she just wasn't sure how much more she could take of it. The last of day of summer had lost all of its novelty and excitement, and was fast becoming exceedingly miserable.

"Why...?!", Candace cried out, to no one in particular. "Curse you, Mysterious Force! Why can't you give me a break for once!? I wasn't even trying to bust them!? I just want everything to be normal again." Candace was abruptly cut off in the middle of her rather loud lamentations by her mother's voice.

"Well, I'm home early", she said, "and I see I didn't miss anything." She shot Candace a disapproving look, the same look she had been seeing on her mother's face for years now. In a nutshell it said "I'm sure I was just as bad when I was younger, but I swear I don't remember doing this crap". Candace had long ago learned to shrug off these looks, so this one too, slid off like water on a duck's back.

"Since I'm home early, I suppose we can have snack time a bit earlier", her mother continued, "Sound good, everyone?"

"Yes please!" The exclamation from the other children in the yard was unanimous.

"grrrrr-rrrr-rrrr"

"Oh, there you are, Perry."

"You know, the word underground is the only word in the English language to start and end with U-N-D."

Candace inwardly cursed the Mysterious Force and everything it stood for. She had been so close! But Perry had come home, Ferb had had his one-liner, and the kids had gone in for snacks. She knew what that meant: there would be no more inventing today.  
Refusing to give up just yet, Candace picked herself up off the ground and pursued her brothers and their friends into the kitchen.

"Phineas?", she asked, desperately hoping she would be able to convince him to break with the pattern, and create multiple large projects in one day.

"Yeah?", he replied, mouth full of pie.

"Can you please, please, rebuild that thing today so we can try again?"

"I'm sorry, sis," he answered, "But it's just not in the budget."

"Budget?", she questioned. Of course, Candace knew the stuff her brothers built with wasn't free, but the thought that they had set a budget of sort was new to her.

"Yeah, budget", Phineas explained, "We don't have unlimited money, you know. The royalty checks from the different things we've made - you know, like Gitchee Gitchee Goo - only go so far. And I doubt we would be able to persuade the city council to invest in this particular project. Even considering Ferb's excellent bargaining skills, I doubt we have the funds to reconstruct anything on that scale today."

"But...but...but..." Candace stuttered. She'd never even remotely considered the fact that her brother's inventing and building was limited to a budget. She definitely hadn't realized that they were earning royalty from some of their creations - and no small amount, it would seem.

"I'm sorry, sis", Phineas said, turning back to his plate. "But we are just kids, you know. And even if we had the funds - we have no way of powering a device of that scale. The pizzazium infinionite we ordered today was the last of our supplier's stock. They won't have more in until sometime next week." He paused, then as was his wont, finished on (what was to him) a positive note. "But no matter! If time is really looping, then you can just have us rebuild the device again tomorrow - which will be today. Just have us build it in the front yard, or something."

So that was it then. There would be no more large-scale inventing today. There was no other choice. She let out a long, dramatic sigh as she dejectedly plodded off to her room. Probably too dramatic, she thought to herself, but still appropriate. There was nothing left to do but go wait around for tomorrow - the beginning of the last day of summer. Again.  
And that was pretty much how she'd gotten this point - lying awake on her bed as the clock neared midnight, mind slowly filling with despair. She almost wished there were a friendly colony of monkeys nearby that she could flee to, to live out her days away from the rest of humanity. But she knew it was useless. Her roving eyes settled on the clock before them.

11:58 PM, Wednesday, September 22nd

11:59 PM, Wednesday, September 22nd

12:00 PM, Wednesday, September 22nd

and...

12:01 AM, Wednesday, September 22nd

Fighting back the urge to just give up, allow the universe to tear itself apart, and accept her fate with dignity, Candace fell at last into a restless sleep. Even in her dreams she could find no peace. Tossing and turning, she dreamed of the horror she had felt when forced to spacewalk through the endless void of space. She dreamed of the T-Rex that had chased them in the year 3 million BC - how when it had smashed the time machine, she had raged at her brothers, but deep down was terrified, frightened that she would be killed, or, perhaps even worse, be forced to live out the rest of her days in ancient prehistory. She dreamed of the time in Africa when she had thought Jeremy was breaking up with her. She dreamed of a anthropomorphic zebra, speaking to her in a soothing yet terrifying voice - "I voted for you, Kevin. I'll always vote for you." She dreamed of squirrels, her deep-rooted, if irrational fear of them keeping her tense and frightened all through the night. Suddenly, she was jerked from her sleep by the buzzing of her alarm clock.

"Beep! Beep!"

"I know what we are going to do today!"

"Beep! Beep!"

"I know what we are going to do today!"

"Beep! Beep!"

"I know wh-"

Candace slammed her hand down on the off button. It was the beginning of Wednesday, September 22nd. It was the last day of summer, yet again. From the backyard she heard her brother's voice.

"Ferb, I know what we are going to do today!"

She sat bolt upright in bed. She had to catch them before they left. Jerking the covers off of her, she kicked open the bedroom door, sprinted down the stairs and out into the backyard in her PJs.

"Wait!" she yelled, and not a moment to soon. Phineas and Ferb had those flying rocket boards out again, and looked just about to fly off into the distance.

"I've got something very important to tell the both you," Candace huffed, suddenly feeling the exertion of having run across the house after them. When they came towards her, she bent down and paused for a second, to make sure that she could recite perfectly the little poem Ferb had given her the day before. Then she said it: "There's a tree growing on the beach. It's coconuts are out of reach. The sand around is white like bleach. You hear a bird above loudly screech." Her brothers eyes both widened and they shared the briefest of glances with each other.

"Is it really you Candace?" Phineas asked, just a moment later, "What time are you from? Do you need something? Where is your time machine?"

"I don't have a time machine", she replied, "I'm, uh..." Candace paused, trying to recall exactly what Phineas had said the day before. "I'm existing outside of an unstable time loop. There are rifts opening in space, devouring matter, and only I can perceive the fact that the twenty-four hours in this day are endlessly repeating."

Phineas ran his hand through his hair. "Hmm", he said, "Unstable time loop, huh? Sounds easy enough to detect. Ferb, we'll need some pizzazium infinionite. I'll call - - -"

And then catastrophe truly struck. Right behind her brothers, with a horrible screechy noise, a fracture opened in space-time, and with a horrible howling, it swallowed them up! Then it was gone. Candace froze, unable to move, or think, or even breathe. Her mind raced.  
"Where are they? Are they okay? Can I get them back?" But most terrifyingly, "What now?" Her brothers, her genius brothers were gone. Just like that, gone. Vanished without a trace. No one would remember them. It would be as if they had never existed. But what could she do about it? Would she be able to bring them back? And if so, how? She knew in her heart that she wasn't nearly smart enough to do the things they did - including the enormous device they had built yesterday. But who could? As her thoughts circled madly through her head like so many fish in a toilet, a name came to the forefront. Of course. Baljeet, the little Indian boy. He was just as - almost as smart as her brothers. Her sense of pride, subconscious though it was, would not allow her to place Baljeet on the same pedestal of brilliance that her brothers took. But he could do it. Phineas had told her that Baljeet had been the one who had designed the portal that transported her to Mars, so many months ago. If he could do that, then maybe he could also see what was going on with, and even fix the space-time continuum. But there was just one problem. She didn't know where he lived.

But Isabella for sure did - and she lived in the house right across the street. Not even cognizant of the fact that she was still shoe-less and in pajamas, Candace hurriedly ran across the street to the Garcia-Shapiro home. The asphalt burned her bare skin, and the concrete of driveway felt less than pleasant. But that mattered not, if it meant she could get her brothers back. Once across the street, she pounded on the door like a person gone mad.

"Open up!", she shouted. "Open up! It's important! I swear it!"

"I'm co-o-oming", Isabella's grumbling voice sounded behind the door. A few seconds later she swung it open.

"Do I know you?"

At first stunned, Candace shook the shock of her brother's longtime crush not recognizing her off. Of course she wouldn't, when as far as Isabella was concerned, Phineas had never existed.

"Yes you do", Candace started, "But that's not important. I need, like, desperately need you to tell me where Baljeet lives!"

"Baljeet?" Isabella said questioningly.

"Yes!", Candace almost shouted in exasperation, "Surely you know him, I don't kno-"

"I know him, I know him," Isabella interrupted, obviously wanting be rid of Candace. "He lives on 232 Sycamore Lane. You know which house..."

"Yeah, thanks!", Candace shouted over her shoulder as she turned and sprinted back down the driveway, leaving Isabella wondering what the heck had just happened to her next-door neighbor. She ran down the street as quickly as was humanly possible (and perhaps a bit quicker), ignoring pain inflicted on her feet from the rapidly heating asphalt. Baljeet's house was just the next street over from Maple Drive. After a short ten minute run, she finally arrived, feet burning and lungs heaving, at the door of 232 Sycamore Lane. Thankfully, Baljeet's house had a doormat in front of the door. Even though it was rough and scratchy on bare feet, it was infinitely better than the fiery hot concrete. Taking a deep breath to calm herself, and help steady her heartbeat, Candace reached to the left and rang the Tjinder's house's doorbell. There was no answer, so she rang it again, and even more impatiently, a third time. At last she heard the sounds of the door being unlocked. Becoming agitated at Baljeet's apparent propensity to take his own sweet time opening doors, she yelled, "Hurry it up! This is important!"

"I am coming! It is open!" he retorted, opening the front door. "What is such an important matter anyway? Wait... Do I know you?"  
Ugh. This again. Candace didn't have time to reintroduce herself to all of her brother's friends.

"Suffice it to say I'm Isabella's next-door neighbor", she huffed out. "And I know you are a nerd so I need you to go get or make some gadget that will let you look at the space-time continuum so can prove to you what I'm about to say."

Baljeet glared. "I am not a nerd. However, I do possess a space-time scanner. Seeing as Isabella must have sent you here, I will oblige you and scan the continuum. Allow me to retrieve it." He briefly disappeared into his house, only to emerge a few seconds later carrying some weird sort of calculator-looking thing that had a small satellite dish plugged into it.

"I have just checked the state of the continuum yesterday", he said, as he pressed some buttons on the device. Candace assumed he was turning it on. As Baljeet talked, the small satellite dish began to rotate. "The continuum is remarkably stable, and has been so since - whoa!"

"What?!" Candace breathlessly exclaimed, even though she was fairly sure what he was going to say.

"The continuum of space-time is showing up as if it was wildly unstable! Why, with readings such as these, a rift could open up and swallow me at any time, and no one would ever remember my existence!"

"Okay then", Candace took a deep breath, "With that in mind - what you just said about rifts and all - let me tell you about my brothers."

"Brothers?" Baljeet raised a questioning eyebrow, without removing his gaze from his devices output. "Are you not an only child? I heard you say you were Isabella's next-door neighbor."

"No, remember-" Candace started to explain, but she was cut off.

"The space-time continuum is stable again." Baljeet stated. "It must have been some sort of strange booting-up error. I will have to debug my code this afternoon."

What. Okay, just what. Stable? How was...

"It's ... it's ... stable?" Candace stammered out.

"It is as stable as it has always been. I thought your story sounded somewhat unbelievable."

"But it is believable! It's true! I swear! Maybe your ...thing!... is broken. Let me see it." Candace made a move to take the scanner, but Baljeet jerked it back away from her, clearly growing impatient with her.

" There is no way the space-time continuum would destabilize on its own, and the technology to do so is many years in the future. If this is your idea of some type of joke, allow me to inform you that it is patently terrible."

"But...but...but...but..."

Baljeet's eyebrows arced up, as he cut her off again. "Allow me state it more plainly. Go away. Your story is almost guaranteed to be entirely falsehood and I do not have the time for this today. I will have to bring this awful attempt at humor up with Isabella when I see her next. Also, your appearance is ... embarrassing."

It was true - she hadn't brushed her hair or gotten dressed or brushed her teeth or anything. Her orange hair was tangled and knotted wildly, her pajamas were now dirty, and her bare feet were blackened from asphalt. But to Candace, none of that mattered. She only wanted to get her brothers back. And at that very moment it seemed as if her last hope of doing so had disappeared with Baljeet as he shut the door on her, in a not very gentle manner.  
She continued staring open-mouthed into space on the Tjinder porch for some time after Baljeet had abandoned her. What could she do now? Then, an idea struck her.

"All this started happening when I pressed that button on that machine that Vanessa's dad had", she thought to herself. "What did he call it? A Do-Over-Inator? I think so." Maybe, she thought, if Vanessa's dad had built the machine to start it, he would be able to bring her brothers back. And also spoons. Spoons would also be nice to have back.

"Okay, think", she told herself. "Where did Vanessa's dad live? And what is his name?" She could only remember the building where he had lived. It was the oddly-shaped purple building, the one with the big sign that read 'Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated'. But that was enough. She had to get downtown to that building.

"But first,", she thought grimly to herself, as she put one of her feet back on the asphalt and drew it back quickly in pain, "First I need to go home and get some shoes. And probably change my clothes."

Now that some of her adrenaline was worn off, walking barefoot on the asphalt was entirely more painful. Candace attempted to walk in people's grass whenever possible, but still had to cross the road twice, and even though she sprinted as if her life depended on it, it still burned badly. Even so, she still made it home in once piece. When she finally made it, she threw open the back door and immediately ran up to her bedroom to get changed, ignoring the incredulous looks on her parents faces. Upstairs, she couldn't resist the urge to look into the room that had once been Phineas and Ferb's, and was horrified to realize that it was now a guest bedroom. All traces of her two little brother's existence was gone. She darted into her room and changed, threw on her shoes, and half-heartedly pulled her brush through hair once before tossing it aside and going back downstairs. But she wasn't able to brush off her parents as easily on the way back out.

"Young lady", her mother called, sounding somewhat stern, "Where do you think you are going?"

"Uh..." Candace stammered, and then paused. She couldn't mention her brothers, since Linda wouldn't remember them, and it would only serve to make her sound like a lunatic. "To the ... Googolplex Mall?" she weakly offered.

But it seemed to satisfy her mother. "I don't want you running out of the house before you've gotten dressed, even this is almost the last day you have to shop before school starts again.", she chided, although the disciplinary tone in her voice had faded. "Now be sure to not spend as much as you did last time. And say hi to Jeremy for me when you see him."

"Uh huh", Candace answered noncommittally as she speed-walked out the door. Once outside, she broke into a run. It was already 9:51 AM, and the bus stop in their neighborhood was a good ten minute walk away. If she wanted to make it on the ten o'clock bus, she knew she had to book it. Sprinting the entire way to the bus stop, Candace finally reached it with two minutes to spare. Bent over, with her hands on her knees, Candace struggled to regain her breath after such early morning exertion. It felt as if she'd been running a lot these past few days. Then something on the bus stop's newspaper dispenser struck her eye. It was the headline of the Daily Danville, which read: **Scandal at Local Zoo!**

In slightly smaller text beneath the headline, Candace read:

_City Accountant Rodney Rodenstein discovered today that the local zoo has supposedly been funneling city funding into an empty exhibit, probably as a cover for embezzlement of city funds. The zoo's books indicate that it has poured over $1M in food and care for creatures in said exhibit over the past twelve years - but it has always been entirely empty. Brought in for...more on page D4._

Standing up straight and stretching, Candace chuckled to herself. No one else in the universe would ever truly understand what had happened; but she knew. Some poor animal had gotten swallowed by the spacial anomalies, and as far as everyone but her was concerned, had never existed. She wondered what animal it was that was taken, but her thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of brakes hissing behind her. The bus was here. Turning around, she quickly climbed on the bus, flashing her bus pass as necessary.

Walking towards the back of the bus she, settled into one of the uncomfortable plastic seats. Now it was just a matter of waiting on the driver. Even as the bus groaned and lurched forwards, Candace leaned forwards, as if to urge the vehicle onward faster. Surely, the driver wasn't going the speed limit, Candace's mind told her, even though, at the same time she knew he probably was. The longer she sat in the cold seat and rode the squeaking machine, the more her emotions built up inside her. By the time the bus finally reached the stop across the street from her distinctively purple destination, she felt as if they had reached the breaking point. Fear, anger, worry, and countless others swirled around like a maelstrom in her mind. As the bus agonizingly slowly pulled to a stop, they began draining away, or rather, coalescing, into one form: determination. Candace knew, no matter what she had to do, or how she had to it, she was going to get her brothers back. So what if no one else in the entire universe would know what she was doing. So what if the Mysterious Force continued to make her miserable? So what if she had to delay her plans for marriage to and life with Jeremy - and Xavier and Amanda, her future children? Blood was thicker than water, after all.

Standing at the bus stop on the busy street, she thought of the time on the drawbridge over Danville's Metropolitan Ovular Access Trench, when the proof she had always dreamed of having - that DVD disc of all her brother's inventions had been teetering on the brink of falling off - offering her a last chance at saving it, and vindicating herself and all her stories to her mother. But she hadn't taken that chance - and why? Because she had saved Phineas' life instead. Because when it all came down to the bitter end, her brothers were more important to her than her mother believing in her tales, more important to her than lots of things. She just didn't like to admit that.

"Get a move on girlie", came a gruff voice behind her, shoving her roughly out of the way, and its owner moved brusquely past her down the sidewalk. Somewhat miffed, Candace was still somewhat glad for the reminder to come down out of the clouds. She couldn't afford to be up there now. She had a mission. She was going to save her brothers. And possibly spoons.

Crossing the busy street and walking up to the entrance of the oddly-shaped and colored building, Candace was momentarily stymied in her progress by finding the entrance locked. Glancing around, she saw a buzzer panel on the left wall next to the door.

"Shoot!", she thought, "How am I supposed to get in now?" Looking over the panel, she chose one button at random and pressed it.

"Hello?", a quavering voice responded. An elderly person was on the other end of the line.

"Yeah hi", Candace rushed out. "I'm Candace Flynn, a friend of Va- Mr. Doofenshmirtz. I seemed to have lost the key he gave me, and was wondering if you would be so kind as to let me in."

"I'm sorry, hon", the voice returned,"I can't hear very well any more. You'll have to speak louder and slower. Did you say you have a Kansas violin?"

"Kansas violin?" she inwardly questioned. Turning back to the box and raising her voice, she yelled, "DOOF-EN-SHMIRTZ. I NEED TO GET IN. I'M HIS FRIEND."

"Did you say Doofenshmirtz? He's a nice man. Why I borrowed sugar from him just the other day. His daughter is nice as well. I see her every other weekend around here."

Candace resisted the urge to shout at the person as they continued babbling on.

"And that's when I said, Vanessa, I think that your father is- ohh, Vanessa, is that you?"

"What? I mean, Yes! Yes it is.", Candace quickly took advantage of this turn in the conversation. "I'm Vanessa Doofenshmirtz, and I seem to have lost my key. Can you buzz me in?"

"Why, Vanessa, I'd be glad to. But what are you doing here on a Wednesday? I've only ever seen you here every other weekend?"

Candace searched through her mind for a believable sounding lie. "I left something of mine at Mr - my father's apartment and I need it back." She was growing irked at the length of the back-and-forth. Why couldn't the other person just shut up and let her in?

"Oh, alright then", came the voice. "If you have time, be sure to drop in and say hello." With a a satisfying bzzzzzzzt! the door finally unlocked.

"Yeah, sure, whatever", Candace tossed over her shoulder as she dashed inside. The lobby was small and plain. The tiled floor was rather smudged, the posters on the wall were beginning to peel and the roof had a large water stain in the middle. A plastic plant stood in each corner. Candace ran through the minuscule area to the elevator. Pressing the button to summon the elevator, she ran through in her mind what she would say when she got up to Mr. Doofenshmirtz's penthouse apartment. He had made the machine that had started the time loops - would he remember the loops? Had he been the reason that the continuum had suddenly gone stable? Candace couldn't tell if the loops were indeed over, she couldn't be sure of that till midnight, but Baljeet had said that the continuum was stable - wasn't that what that meant? And there had been no more time rifts, at least not that she had seen.

Dinging loudly, the elevator doors finally slid open. Walking inside and pressing the button, Candace leaned against the wall as the elevator lurched upwards. Elevator music filled the empty space, and Candace recognized the tune. It was Gitchee Gitchee Goo. How had she not heard this before. She remembered the day when Phineas and Ferb had formed their little band and written that song - their one-hit wonder that had shot to the top of the charts in thirty minutes and stayed there for only as long. Phineas had claimed that they had turned down a lucrative contract with Huge-O Records, in favor of being a one-hit wonder, but apparently they hadn't divested themselves of everything related to the song. Candace felt her heart melting as she remember standing up on the stage, singing with her brothers in the middle of the mall. But the time for melancholy memories was not now. The elevator groaned and creaked to a stop, and with a ding! the doors slid open. She was on the top floor. Now was the time for action.

Looking down the hall, Candace located a door with a 'Doofenshmirtz' nameplate bolted into it. Ringing the doorbell, she waited impatiently for an answer, but there was none. She rang it again, and again, and a third time. But no one came. She could feel her annoyance growing, so she laid a hand on the doorknob, and, to her surprise, it yielded easily. The swung open, and light from the hallway streamed into the dark penthouse.

"Hello?" she called into shadows.

"Hello?" came back an echo.

"Is anyone there?" she called. Only the reverberations of her voice responded.

Swallowing, she took a step forwards into the apartment and felt along the wall for a light switch, but there was none. That's right, she remembered Vanessa complaining that her dad had hooked the lights to a huge floor-mounted lever. Slowly walking into the room, she reached forwards with her hands in an effort to find the switch. After a few moments of wandering in the dark, she felt a large metal pole protruding from the floor. This had to be it. Readjusting her hands for a better grip, she took ahold of it and gave it a pull. It moved surprisingly easily, like a well-oiled machine. A deafening 'woomph woomph woomph' filled the room as large industrial lights slowly turned on, illuminating the area. But what she saw in the light was no more encouraging. The entire room was completely empty. When she had been there before, the room was full of random gadgets, tools, and even a kitchen setup in the corner. And now... it was all gone. No wonder her voice had echoed. The cavernous roof of the penthouse enclosed an entirely empty space. Candace didn't know where Doofenshmirtz had gone, but one thing was for certain: he wasn't here.

In the very center of the room, a small plastic table stood, with a piece of paper on it. Drawing near, she discovered it was a letter, left by Doofenshmirtz to someone named Perry. A friend, perhaps? Picking up the letter, Candace caught a whiff of perfume. The letter was scented? Waving away the scent wafting off the paper, she read it.

_Dear Perry;_

_I've finally gone and done it. No, for real this time. I've given up evil - and I swear I'm being honest. I know I did this before, like twice, but this time I have a very good reason. You see, I recently discovered Vanessa wants to start interning at OWCA - and you know that she is pretty much the most important person to me. No offense, Perry. Not that you are person anyways. She's convinced me to give up evil, for good this time. No pun intended. Of course, by that I mean, totally tended._  
_I decided to pack up and move somewhere else - somewhere closer to HSWCA, where she will be going very soon, and also closer to OWCA. If I'm going to give up evil, I need to be away from my old lab. I've broken down and sold all my inators - that money, plus my alimony was enough to rent a little house in the suburbs. I wish I hadn't gotten rid of the one I had before. This one is much smaller, and there is no pool. I'm sure you won't believe it, and I suppose that's justified, although I must say, I am a little offended by the idea. I'm sure I'll be seeing you drop by sometime in the future. Maybe we can play checkers or go bowling or something. Don't let old Monobrow keep you away from me, or I may have to whip up a little evil._  
_Vanessa says to write that she won't let me. I'm so proud of her, making her own way in life. It's been hard to watch her grow up, and even though she won't be going into the family business, I intend to support her in her decision. If I learned anything from my childhood, it's how to not raise a child. I don't intend to make those mistakes again. I've had a long chat with Vanessa, and it turns out that she's wanted this for a long time now. I suppose it took me almost destroying the entire universe to realize what was really important in my life._  
_But let's let bygones be bygones. Come and see me sometime, I may get lonely out in the suburbs on the weekends when I'm not at the school. I've kept Norm though, since I didn't have the heart to actually break down that walking junk pile. I hope you don't mind. He never was truly evil anyway, unless you count the crunchy eggs he makes. But I've written too much already._

_Your nemesis,_

_Heinz Doofenshmirtz_

__Candace sighed and dropped the letter back on the table. So they were really and truly gone then. Moved out - somewhere closer to OWCA, whatever that was. Whatever it stood for, it was not a cool acronym. But whatever it was - she didn't know where it was. It could be across the Tri-State Area, or even over in the Quad-State Area. Heck, it could even be across the country, or even across the globe. Candace knew she didn't have Vanessa's phone number, so even that link to the scientist had been severed. There really wasn't anyway she would be able to find them. Unless one of them contacted her, they were as good as gone forever._ _

__Candace sat on the floor next to the table, with despair beginning to well up inside and fill her soul. So that was it then. Doofenshmirtz - Heinz Doofenshmirtz - was gone. She didn't know where, and couldn't really tell why. She didn't even know if he had been the one to actually build the machine. Maybe he had just bought it online? Vanessa had never told her that she was starting an internship. But they'd not been that close, so that was somewhat understandable. But with Doofenshmirtz gone, who could she get to build something that could get her brothers back? Who had the resources to create and intelligence to operate a device like the one she needed? Candace once again felt the urge to just run away - far, far away. There were no monkeys in Danville, but maybe there were some other animals that would take her in and let her life out her life isolated from humanity - from her failures, both to bust her brothers, and now to help them._ _

__But she couldn't. Couldn't give up. Not just yet. Her brothers were somewhere, she could feel it. Wherever they were, they needed help, help to get back - back to where they belonged. Making impossible things in the shade of the tree in the backyard, while she blustered about busting and safety, where her heart was filled with resentment that they could get away with so many things, while her innermost soul was deeply impressed and even more deeply, loved them both. But if they needed help, there was only one person that Candace knew could understand the situation enough to give them the aid she was sure they required. Herself. For the first time in a long while, her brothers needed her help._ _

__What was it that Phineas always said? Seize the day? That was it. She had to seize the day. If no one would, or could, build the things she needed, then, by God, she was going to do it herself._ _


	2. No Man Should Know His Own Demise

In the heat of the moment, when she first seized on the idea - that she herself was going to be the one destined to tear holes in the universe itself to find her brothers - she never stopped to ponder what such a task would actually entail. But, since that brief moment, with it's overflowing courage and foolhardy determination had passed, cold, hard reality seemed to be getting the way. Candace couldn't help but feel as if she really wasn't up to the task she had so recently taken upon herself to complete. But she couldn't give up, not now, not yet. She dredged up from her memory the scene in her backyard yesterday, which was actually today, but that was unimportant. The giant metal superstructure that had been erected seemed even larger now that it had before, now that she had undertaken the task of recreating it. But no matter. Mentally, Candace created a list of things that she would need for the mammoth project, some things only making it on the list because she had heard Phineas describing their usage in the original machine.

1\. ) A ton of metal. Sheeting, beams, supports, you name it.

2.) Concrete. For the foundation of the beast.

3.) Some sort of computer that would allow her to control it.

4.) A negative mass generator

5.) Something that can generate a large amount of electric current. A tesla coil, maybe?

6.) Pizzazium Infinionite. Hadn't Phineas said this was the main power source?

7.) Something that could create nuclear fission. Had Phineas and Ferb had a nuclear power generator inside that thing? She remembered that day when they had almost built a cold fusion generator, before getting distracted. Hopefully they hadn't used one of those.

Those were the things she knew were needed, based solely on the appearance of the machine and Phineas' exuberant spiel about its inner workings. She still had absolutely no idea how she was going to be able to put it all together, much less into a machine capable of tearing holes in the very fabric of reality. Nevertheless, she had to start somewhere. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single footstep.

First things first: she needed tools. Hammers and nails, buckets and blowtorches, screwdrivers, mallets, jackhammers, and the whole lot. She'd probably need to use some sort of crane or cherry picker for the construction of the very top layers. It was time to go shopping - but not at the mall. Candace was headed to the hardware store. She knew where it was from her various experiences with her brothers. In fact, it was conveniently within walking distance of the building she was in right now. Slowly pulling herself up off the floor, and slightly adjusting the table to best resemble the position it had been in upon her arrival, Candace walked out of the penthouse, shutting off the lights behind her. Pressing the elevator button, she waited impatiently in the hall for its arrival. A few long seconds later - the doorway dinged, and the doors slid open, revealing the cab. Unlike last time, however, it was occupied. Candace was somewhat taken aback by the occupant.

"Oh...there you are... Perry?", she said, in a questioning tone, entering the elevator and pressing the Lobby button.

"What are you doing in an apartment building?"

The platypus stared at her with one glazed eye.

"Gr-rr-rr"

"You're not supposed to be downtown. Go home."

The elevator dinged once more, doors opening on the lobby.  
Candace hesitated momentarily, feeling a little loath to leave the last real trace of her brothers behind in an elevator. But she had more important things to do. Scowling, she muttered under her breath "This is Africa all over again." Then she abruptly turned on her heel and walked out, leaving the animal to do - well, - whatever it was planning on doing. Platypi didn't do much, as a rule. She was rather surprised the lazy animal had found it in itself to walk all the way downtown. And who had pushed the button to the let him on the elevator? Maybe this was where he went everyday. Who knew?

Pushing the doors to the lobby open wide and stepping out into the sunny street, Candace looked left and right, orienting herself for her trip to the hardware store. Before she could even take one step, however, her phone buzzed in her pocket. Quickly scooping it up, she glanced at the caller ID. It was Stacy. Surprising even herself, she had to fight back the urge to just ignore the call. But it would be fine - she could walk and talk. Opening the phone and putting it up to her ear, she said "Hello?"

"Candace?" came the voice of her best friend from the other end of the line.

"Yeees?" she drawled, looking left and right, and hastily sprinting across the street.

"Are you going to be late?"

"Late?" the question surprised her. She had made an appointment with Stacy? For what?

"Yes, late! You're not with Jeremy are you? I thought we were going to the mall! It's the last day of summer, I mean, geez! We've only been planning this for, like, ever!"

"What? I mean - yeah, no! yes! what?" Candace had no memory of a long-standing appointment today. But as her thoughts raced while her friend babbled on the phone, it began to make sense. You see, she figured, as far as the entire universe was concerned, her brothers had never existed. She was, and had always been, an only child. So, in this weird sort of alternate timeline where that was true, her life would have been drastically different. She began wondering what else had changed as the result of various things no longer existing. Of course, there were holes in her theory - she was fairly sure, that, based on her memories, she never would have met Stacy in the first place so many years ago if not for her brothers. Perhaps the space-time continuum's self-repairing could only extend so far. Maybe it couldn't erase all traces of somethings existence - only fairly recent traces. It was all fairly confusing. Suddenly, an idea popped into her head. Of course! The museum! The time machine! She could use it - no, her brothers had been erased from the space-time continuum. That would include past, present, and future. But there was another person from the future she could go to - herself. Not that the future her would remember her brothers, but the future her would have access to future technology, and they could work together to rebuild the continuum warping device. It would only be an issue on taking a DNA test to prove to herself that she was, well, herself. It wasn't a foolproof idea, and had a frightening possibility of causing a terrible temporal loop or paradoxical situation, but what else could she do? Build the machine from scratch by herself, with today's technologies? Candace snorted to herself. No way, no how. Just because her brothers could do something like that, didn't mean she could.

"Sorry, Stace", she suddenly spoke, cutting her friend off mid-rant. She knew that was the sort of thing that could put a friendship in jeopardy - but, she also reasoned that once she was able to bring her brothers back to reality, Stacy would begin remembering them again, and she could explain the whole fiasco then. It would be much easier to gain forgiveness than permission.

"I've gotta go. It's a - a- family emergency. I'll talk to you later." With that she snapped her phone shut, not stopping to heed the complaints coming from the other end of the call. She abruptly halted in her path to the hardware store. She had a new destination in mind. However, the museum was much farther away than the hardware store. She'd need to take the bus, or a cab. Glancing around, she saw neither. Candace groaned to herself. It was in times like these when she wished she still had those super speed boots, even if they had ended up causing more trouble than they were worth. Whatever, she decided, after a moment's worth of internal deliberation. The bus stop was not that far behind her. She'd need to only to retrace a few of her steps, then wait for the - what time was it? Pulling her phone out, she was shocked to learn it was already eleven o'clock. The morning had flown by faster than she had anticipated. Candace felt as if she had been running all over town all day.

Walking back the way she had came to the bus stop went uneventfully enough. She wryly noted while sitting on the hard bus seats that apparently toothpicks had also been taken. She came to this conclusion while watching, with a mixture of horror and curiosity, an old man pick his teeth with the end of matchstick. Or maybe they hadn't and this guy was just weird. Who knew. People did freaky stuff sometimes. The bus ride to the museum couldn't have actually been longer that twenty minutes or so, but Candace felt like it took forever. She was forced to shrug off a phone call from her mother, when she received a text wondering why her phone was not at the mall. It would be too complicated to explain the whole situation - and like with Stacy, would be infinitely easier once her brothers had been brought back. The bus brakes released an ear-piercing squeal, signalling arrival at their destination. Stepping out of the bus, she suddenly wondered if the time machine would even be fixed anymore - if her brothers had been erased from existence, they wouldn't have been here to fix it, would they? Candace didn't claim to understand the complex technicalities of the space-time continuum. She could only hope that her previous theory, that they had only been erased for a small chunk of time directly before and after their disappearances, was true. But, how could that be true, if people didn't have old memories of them from years ago? Candace shook her head, and stepped around a sign reading, "New Wing Under Construction", and began walking up the steps to the museum's entrance. The finer nuances of the situation she would leave to someone smarter to understand. She would just take things at face value, and do her best to fix the whole darn thing. And, as it seemed right now, her future self would be her best shot at that. Pushing open the glass doors, she recalled the last time she had met the future counterparts of her family. Would they be the same? Or had the ripples in the space-time continuum changed the future? And if so, how drastically?

Turning left into the 'Gadgets Through the Ages' exhibit, Candace once again shook her head to clear it of all these thoughts. She couldn't be bothered by them now. Just up ahead sat the time machine. It was time to see if it worked. She chuckled slightly, sure that there was a bad pun somewhere to be made from her last statement. No matter. The time was, indeed, now.

She quickly closed the remaining distance between herself and the machine. Gripping the handrail on the side, she hauled herself over and into the seat, the ratty red cushioning not providing any actual cushioning. Candace took a moment to study the controls on the rail in front of her. They were rather intuitive, so it took a good few seconds for her to grasp how they worked. Pressing the button next to the largest dial, Candace repeatedly pressed it until it read 2037. Twenty years in the future should be good enough, she reasoned. It was how far she had gone back last time, and that had shown her a future of herself where she was stable, mature, married to - well, she hadn't actually ever seen or heard who future her was married to. Candace had assumed that it was Jeremy, but there was a possibility it wasn't, she now supposed, though the idea of that was somewhat strange. Her time of rumination was cut short, however, as an indignant shout echoed through the museum's corridors. Looking up, she saw a security guard hastily making his way toward her. It was time to go. Without giving herself a chance to second-guess anymore, Candace reached for the time machine's activation lever, and gave a mighty tug. As she had hoped, a swirling purple light enveloped her. For a few seconds, she once again felt the strange feeling of time travel. It was a tingling sort of feeling, one that overtook your entire body and made you feel weak, yet at the same time, immovably firm. Then the purple glow flashed again, and it was gone. She was here - having not moved in space, but instead having moved in time. She glanced around. The museum was, for the most part, unchanged. A few exhibits had been rearranged, and a thick layer of dust had collected on everything. Of course, considering that, as far as everyone else had seen, she and the machine had disappeared for twenty years, Candace was somewhat surprised that the museum had left the machines' podium empty and unchanged for all that time.

  
Climbing out, she steadied herself against the machine. Once ready to walk again, she began the trek out of the building. Remembering her last visit to twenty-years-in-the-future Danville, she knew what kind of technology and advancements to expect. It was to her surprise, and not a little pain, when she slammed her face right into the door of the museum.

"Owww", she muttered, rubbing her nose, "Aren't these virtual doors? Don't they open automatically?" She gingerly stuck her hand out and grabbed the knob. No virtuality about this particular door. Turning the knob, she winced at the prolonged shrieking of the hinges. Obviously this door hadn't opened in a very long time. Stepping out into the sunlight, a frightening scene presented itself to her. The city of Danville - well, it looked terrible! The park in front of the museum was gone, replaced by towering gray condominiums, the sides of which where generously plastered in graffiti and dirt. Shoving a sign out of her way down the steps, she turned back to glance at the museum building. The signs no longer read of the new wing.

Instead, they read: " **Warning! Building condemned. Keep Out! By order of the mayor.** "

Something about the whole scene unnerved her. Future Danville was no longer the happy, clean, place it had been before. It was dirty, and crowded with buildings, and smoky. There was absolutely no one on the streets. The only sound came from the whistling of the breeze, and the sound of the road crunching beneath her feet. It was in poor shape, littered with potholes, and practically crumbling to pieces in some places. But it matched the rest of the city. Candace made her way to the bus stop, or where the bus stop had been. Now, there was only a bent up, rusted metal frame left, the giant holes in it's construction evident as light pooled on the ground underneath it. Another official-looking document was nailed to one of the poles. Lifting it so that she could read it, Candace noted that, despite it's protective plastic sleeve, the paper had yellowed with age.

" _Attention! Citizens of the Tri-State Area,_ " it read, " _the bus service has been discontinued, seeing as no one will need it anyway. Officially-approved buses will conduct you from your home to your daily Construction Time. By order of the mayor -_ " Candace stopped reading, shocked at what came after. She could hardly believe it. Was it true?

" _By order of the mayor,_  
_Signed, Candace G. Flynn_ "

Candace dropped the paper back. What was this? She was the mayor? That was new. But, - looking around at the state of the city, it's deserted streets and decaying buildings, she wondered whether mayor was just title, a title covering something more sinister. Of course, it couldn't be!, she reasoned. This was herself she was talking about. Maybe there was just a misunderstanding. Things looked kinda bad in this part of the city, and the paper she read had sounded strange. But surely there was a fair and decent explanation of it all. There must be. Maybe this part of town was just abandoned? And what was Construction Time? Candace was interrupted by the sound of footsteps crunching on the ground behind her. Turning, she felt somewhat relived. Someone who lived here! Surely they would be able to assuage her fears, explain the mundane reasons behind the grimy looking future. There had to be an explanation. There just had to be!

  
But it was no ordinary citizen who had come up behind Candace. Upon turning around, she came face to ... chest with a burly, frightening-looking man in a military uniform. Only, it was pink and covered in flowers. The look on his face, even though his eyes were hidden behind dark lenses, was enough to stifle any trace of mirth Candace might have had at his strange looking apparel. He continued coming closer until he was right in front of her, where his unusual height allowed him to tower over her in a terrifying display of intimidation. Now, Candace was not easily frightened by people. She had her fears, but few _people_ where able to sway her. Phineas, strange as it may seem, was on that very short list, even though he almost never used it to his advantage. (And how could he not? Even though he was her brother, and Candace loved him and knew he loved her very dearly, how could you not be at least slightly intimidated by a person who held the very laws of nature in the palm of his hand?) Anyone else? Not a chance. But this - this was different. This man's face was hard, and his measured breathing seem to indicate that here was a person who would feel no mercy, no regret, even as he extinguished her like so many candles. Even though she could not see his eyes, Candace felt as if his stare was burning into her soul. At last, he spoke.

"This is a restricted area, citizen", he said, his voice steely and deep. Candace opened her mouth, about to make an attempt at self-defense, but he continued before she could get at so much as a squeak.

"Do you have a pass for traveling into this area at this time?" he asked.

Candace knew she didn't, and also knew that this fact wouldn't help her situation. So she attempted to lie. "Y-yes", she claimed, voice shaky, "B-b-but I left it at my house. I, uh, didn't know I would be stopped."

The man paused for a second, just long enough for Candace to think her falsehood had worked, but her hopes were cruelly dashed just moments later.

"If you don't have them on your person, then you don't have them at all", he said, extending his hand and taking her arm in a vice-like grip. Then turned and began walking, half-dragging Candace behind him. "Come along", he said. "We are going to see the mayor."

He was walking slowly, but his strides were long, and Candace struggled to keep up. The sound of the gravel and chunks of asphalt underneath their feet was deafening. What was going to happen to her? Would her future self recognize her? Would she be able to convince her future self of her identity? What if she wasn't able to? These and other questions pounded themselves into her brain. As an attempt to take her mind off of them as she was half-escorted, half-perp-walked, and half-dragged down the road, Candace took to studying the back of the man's uniform. It had the word "V.E.M.U.F.F." written on the back, but it was struck through and sloppily scribbled over, as though someone was too lazy to fully cover it. Underneath, in equally sloppy writing was the phrase: "Mayoral Police".

 _Mayoral Police_? Since when did the office of mayor come with a police force? Obviously, something had gone wrong. The term 'mayor' no longer meant what it did in Candace's own time. It was a little terrifying. Especially with the thought that _she_ had done this. What had happened that had caused her future self to go through such a psychosis, that had made future her assume the office of mayor - a post which now seemed to more closely resemble that of a dictator? It was these thoughts, and others, that kept Candace occupied during the short walk to the end of the street with her silent captor. At the end of the street, he looked up in the sky and pulled a radio out of his belt with his free hand, his other not wavering in the unshakeable grip on her arm - much to her growing discomfort. The radio conversation was brief and to the point.

"This is Unit 12-B, reporting in from the corner of Wessex and Main. I've got an attempted truant and am requesting immediate transport for the prisoner to HQ. Over."

"Request granted, 12-B. Stand by for transport. Over."

That was it. The man slid his radio back into his belt and craned back his head, searching the skies. Quite literally moments later, a faint buzzing noise could be heard. It grew louder and louder - and then a red chair descended from the sky, hovering in mid-air by way of a rotor extending from it's back. It ceased moving mere inches away from them, it's propellers giving forth a low-pitched whine as they kept the strange device aloft. The chair was much too small for a someone much larger than a toddler to sit comfortably in it, but that seemed like no obstacle to the officer. Turning to her, he effortlessly lifted her bodily off the ground and planted her in the small chair. Candace let out a surprised shriek, but it seemed as if it glanced harmlessly off the ears of the man. Pulling out a pair of handcuffs, he cuffed her hands behind the back of the chair, and then smacked the back, causing Candace to lurch forward in a frightening manner. The rotors began speeding up and the pitch of their constant whine spiked quickly. Candace had enough experience with flying machines to know what that meant. Uh oh.

Then it happened. At an insane rate of speed, it shot high into the air, and began traveling quickly over the city. The tiny seat threatened to capsize and dump her out at any moment, and so Candace sat stock still, terrified, bracing her wrists against the cold metal cuffs, as her only way of ensuring she didn't go tumbling off to her death in the dystopian city below her.

Then, just as quickly as it had risen, the flying chair began rapidly descending towards the ground. For a moment, a thought raced through Candace's mind - " _It's going to slam into the ground and kill me._ " But it didn't. Instead, it came to an abrupt halt just inches above the ground. The sudden stop, at roughly the same height as a normal chair, set in motion some very uncomfortable feelings in Candace's stomach. She squeezed her eyes shut and began drawing in deep breaths in an attempt to ward off the nausea quickly welling up inside. It slowly subsided, and she re-opened her eyes when she felt the chair begin moving again. It moved more slowly this time, and (thankfully) along the ground. It slowly moved out of the parking lot where it had originally stopped, and towards a low, concrete building just a handful of yards away. There was a small sign over to the left, that said something about not paying attention to something. Candace wasn't able to catch the full text as she left it behind. The chair stopped once more just outside of the building's automatic doors. After a moment, an ominous hissing sound emanated from them, and they swiftly slid open. There stood another guard, wearing the same ridiculous outfit as the one before, but there was a slight difference. This one wasn't nearly as tall, nearly as thick, or nearly as muscular. In fact, he was rather gangly, and his helmet looked as if it was somewhat on the large side. As a result, this man was far less intimidating than the one before, although the large, weirdly-colored gun in his hand more than made up for it. As the new guard circled around back and undid the handcuffs, she craned her neck to make out the lettering on its side.

" _Disintegrate-inizer_ "

That wasn't any comfort at all. And so it was, even though the guard didn't actually lay a hand on her, she willingly complied with his single spoken order.

"Walk." His voice was high and grating. But the Disintegrate-inizer was plenty of enforcement. Candace stood up out of the chair and began walking along with him, deep into the bowels of the building. When she heard the doors slide closed behind them, it felt as if all trace of hope had been left outside with the flying chair. What would happen to her? Would she be trapped here - twenty years in the future - forever? Or worse? Candace's original motivation for traveling so far into the future - saving her brothers - had not abated any since the time she had first made that decision. But it had changed inside of her. It was no longer a crazy, desperation fueled rush that would push her to insane actions to her quest. Instead it solidified - set like cement. It was now more of a quiet determination, partly because Candace had realized that if she were permanently incapacitated or worse - that her brothers would never be saved anyway. After a silent few minutes of walking with her new guard, their shoes echoing and re-echoing off of the tiled floor of the hall of whatever building they were in, they finally ceased walking in front of a large set of double doors. Stepping in front of her, but still keeping the gun trained, the guard rapped his knuckles on the door.

"Miss Mayor, I have a truant case for you to decide upon."

Candace heard a startled snort coming from the other side of the door. Then ...

"heh heh heh heh heh... *snort* B-bring them in."

The guard pushed open the door, and stepping back behind her, followed her in as he pushed her forward into the room. What a scene was laid out - both so strange that Candace felt inclined to laugh, but yet so frightening that she wouldn't have felt bad for breaking down in tears. At the other end of the room, sitting crouched on a ratty office chair, sat herself. Her future self of course, older by twenty years. Candace had seen her future self before, but this was different. What had happened to her now-future self? Her eyes were wild - one lazily out of focus - , her hair so dirty and unkempt, a long angry looking scar burned down her left arm, her teeth grossly yellowed and stained, her clothes tattered and splotched with dark red - Candace immediately put an end to that train of thought. It was too horrible a possibility to even be briefly entertained.

But even as she cast her eyes about the disorganized room, and her future self's callow, sunken form, she knew something bad had happened. Her future self crouched still on the chair for a few moments laughing quietly to herself, and it was not a happy laugh. It was a horridly disturbing sound which should never be heard from any person. Finally, Future Candace raised her head, and their eyes met. Her wild stare, like that of a cornered animal, struck an unholy terror into Candace's heart. This person was no longer her, she felt it. But - it had to be. Just what had the past twenty years done to her? Had Future Candace's brothers done this to her? Had she even found her brothers? All this and more passed through her mind. Suddenly, Future Candace lept up out of her chair, emitting an inhuman wail that shook her to her very soul. With a single quick movement Future Candace seized a long-silver colored gun off the battered desk to her right. Candace now saw that it was attached to a pack on Future Candace's back by a thick black hose. The straps of the pack were deeply sunken into Future Candace's shoulders, as if it hadn't been removed in years. With violently shaking arms, Future Candace pointed the silver gun in her direction. Candace heard the guard behind her step back, as if he knew what was about to happen.

Then Future Candace spoke, and her voice was a new horror. It was tremulous and quavering, harsh and very hoarse. Together with her restlessly roving eyes and scarred face, it presented the picture of a deeply disturbed person - someone whose spirit had stretched as far as it would go, bent as far as it could, and when time and trials had attempted to push it farther, had simply snapped. The mental psychosis had left a painfully obvious emotional trauma in its wake, that much was plainly evident in the stammering, halting voice that that Candace heard.

"It-it's you! Me! Ha! Not this time! I remember! I know what happened! They won't save you like they did me! No! Think you can have what I did? Have what was taken from me! No! It's not right! That day was the end of my life! No one would believe me! Ha! Look at me now! They believe! They believe now! _I made them!_ And you! I know how you feel! It's no matter. You won't be saved. _I'll end you. Now._ "

Future Candace ended her tirade, and left the threat hanging in the air. She licked her lips, as if tasting the mortal fear that now completely froze Candace, permeating every limb of her body. Suddenly, her unfocused eye shifted and looked at Candace. Both her eyes narrowed and she began giggling maniacally while slowly squeezing the trigger on her silver gun. A low-pitched whine drifted from it's end, which began glowing, first dimly, then slowly brightening, until it lit the whole room, almost blinding Candace with its intensity. Future Candace was still laughing like a madman.

  
Suddenly, a terrible shaking seized the whole building. Candace and Future Candace both looked up, as the entire roof was suddenly torn off, and tossed aside, showering the room in shards of metal and concrete and wood. An alien green light shone down through the gaping hole where the ceiling used to be. Above them, a flying saucer was hovering effortlessly, showering the area underneath it with the light. Candace had seen many alien ships in her time, but this wasn't one she recognized. The light dimmed slightly, but brightened in the circle around Candace, and she found herself floating into the air. Suddenly coming unglued, she let out a scream. Surely this was the end? Her only hope was that she could use her connection with Meap to secure some sort of safety with her intergalactic kidnappers. If Meap even remembered her brothers - which he probably didn't.

"Nooooooo! Not her! Take me! Me! I can sing it too!" screamed Future Candace, the hoarseness in her voice becoming more apparent as she attempted to shout over the incredibly loud, yet somehow unnoticed howling noise of the tractor beam that was pulling Candace into the flying saucers' gaping maw.

"Nooo! They won't! Bwahahahahahha!" She suddenly burst into horrifyingly bitter laughter, then fully pulled the trigger on her gun. Another loud sound manifested itself, competing with that of the tractor beam. But this one was different - Candace recognized it. It was the distinctive shrieky tearing sound that resulted from something _ripping a hole in space and time_. Candace knew it from when random holes had appeared during the time loops. But this one was different - it coming from a hole created _purposefully_ by Future Candace. She was trying to swallow her up in a temporal rift! A bright white beam shot out of the tip of the gun. But then, the unexpected happened. The beam, aimed directly at the hovering saucer, reflected off of it's silvery surface, and rebound in the direction it had come. With a freakish ripping sound , the hole in space and time was torn open in the floor beneath Future Candace. Her insane eyes and hollowed features suddenly flashed over with fear, a fear so raw and brutal, that Candace had a feeling of pity shoot through her, even as the tractor beam was pulling her through the air.

A cloak, which had been lying innocently on floor, suddenly stood up straight behind Future Candace. Someone had been hiding underneath it this whole time? A pair of hands shot out from under the cloak and seized the pack on Future Candace's back. The straps holding the pack on stretched, but did not give. Future Candace reached up and wildly failed her arms around, her visage frozen in terror. In her mad efforts to save herself, however, Future Candace elbowed her savior under the cloak. Even though she couldn't hear it, Candace could tell it had hit somewhere painful. The cloaked figure crumpled to the ground, dropping it's grasp on the pack. With an ear-splitting _schloomp!_ Future Candace, pack and all, fell straight through the rift and was gone. A blink of an eye later, the hole slammed closed, leaving no evidence that it had ever been there. Candace covered her on eyes with her hands. She had seen her future, and this was how it ended? _This?_ No! She would, she had to change her future. If someone changing the past would change the present, then changing the present would surely have an equivalent effect on the future. This wouldn't be the end of her. She wouldn't allow it. There was too much riding on her for her to allow her life to end so suddenly in the future.

In all this thought, Candace had almost forgotten the fact that, right at that very moment, she was still being pulled through the air by a tractor beam into an unidentified alien spaceship, and that someone else was still in the room, disguised by a cloak, although now they were lying motionless on floor, presumably in pain. Whoever they were, they would be no help now.

"Pull yourself together!" Candace thought, giving herself an internal smack in the face. Whoever these aliens were, they surely knew Meap, or at least the Shooting Star Milkshake Bar. And if there was one thing aliens (or everyone, really) would know to take advantage of, it would be a person blubbering incoherently. She had to have a straight face on when she finally met them. The howling of the tractor beam intensified, then stopped. Candace felt the sensation of a solid floor materializing underneath of her. She was inside the ship. Now was the time to be brave. She felt a heavy thing being set on her head. Were the aliens beginning brain probing already? She knew enough of alien culture that it was highly unlikely. It was considered rude to begin such procedures without at least greeting the victim. At least, so Meap had said.

Candace took a deep breath and forced herself to open her eyes. But the scene which met her eyes was not one which she was expecting. There were no horrible-looking aliens ready to slice and dice up her insides in the name of science. The aliens were short, and green, and had a multiple vertically stacked eyes and large overbites. Their antennae came just up to Candace's stomach height. They were Martians! Candace reached up and felt the heavy thing resting on her head. It felt suspiciously like a crown. One of the Martians reached behind his back and produced a crude photograph. Studying it, Candace realized it was her - from when she had been abandoned on Mars after her brother's portal had malfunctioned. They had come back to Earth to find her, the person they had crowned as their queen. Candace narrowed her eyes. How come, if her brothers and all of their inventions had been wiped from the universe, how come the Martians remembered her? Hadn't history been rewritten without them? It was the same thing with the time machine that Phineas and Ferb had rebuilt. Although it was no longer looping, it was obvious the space-time continuum was still very much messed up. Perhaps rewriting history without a person was much harder than rewriting without, say, spoons. Who knew?

Seeing her sitting still with a suspicious look on her face, the Martians took it on themselves to snap her out of it. One of them stepped forwards slightly and produced another crude photograph, this time of Candace, Phineas and Ferb all sitting on a Mars rover, driving towards a purple portal that led back to Earth.  
The mere sight of her brothers, even if it was only in a photograph, caused Candace to catch her breath. How were they in a photograph if they had never existed? Perhaps the space-time continuum ripples hadn't spread this far into the future yet. Or perhaps the ripples had just missed the photograph. Either way, Candace snatched the picture out of the alien's hand and studied it closely. She could still remember that day like it was yesterday, even considering that yesterday had been the same day in a row for over three months. The picture gave Candace hope. Her brothers weren't completely erased from the memory of the universe yet. But she had to get to them before they were, and not in least because she had to divert the terrible future she had just seen play out before her eyes. Perhaps she should be thankful, considering she now had a loyal army of Martians and their flying saucer behind her, ready to support and cater to her every whim. Being truly in charge felt nice. She could get used to it.

Suddenly, Candace realized what she was thinking. The universe was trying to get her to follow in the path of her future self - to become the version of herself she had seen just moments earlier. "No!" she thought. "I have to do something different. I will _not_ let that become my future." Candace stood up at last, towering over the Martians. The group of aliens split in two, clearing a path to what was apparently the front of the saucer. Waiting for her was a control panel, and a chair, far too large for Martians, but just the right size for her. They had designed this saucer with her in mind, apparently, and now they wanted her to fly it. Candace knew she would have to abandon them, but not before getting back to the time machine. She needed it to get back in time, but also, more importantly, needed it to get Future Candace's rift gun. A crazy paradox-creating idea had popped into her head. If she used the time machine to go back in time just a handful of minutes, she could take the rift gun from Future Candace like that strange cloaked person had tried to do. Whoever that was, Candace was sure she could convince them she needed it more. With the two of them together, surely they could manage to take it from Future Candace. She could take it back to the past and use it to tear open the fabric of time and space and pull her brothers back into reality.

Stepping forwards towards the seat, Candace ran her eyes over the array of buttons and levers on the saucer's dashboard. Just who did the Martians think she was, assuming that she would be able to pilot their ship? Subconsciously, Candace reached into her pocket and patted her wallet, assuring herself that her driver's permit was with her. A moment later, the silliness of that action smote her, as she realized that, not only had her permit surely expired in the past twenty years she had skipped over with the time machine, but she was fairly sure that it didn't cover flying saucers anyway. Also - there was the fact that the Tri-State Area was now a dystopic regime, cruelly marred by its half-insane ruler, Future Candace.

Sitting down on the seat, Candace was surprised at its comfort. It was the first chair she'd sat down on in hours that was actually comfortable. Studying the controls more thoroughly, she decided that maybe she should not touch any of the buttons, but only use the joystick directly in front of the seat. Taking a firm grip on it, she was interrupted by the sound of a time machine. The cab of the saucer was momentarily filled with a flash of purple light. Turning around in her seat, she saw a time machine - literally just like the one she had left back at the museum - sitting in the middle of the spaceship. The Martians all ooh-ed in wonder. Sitting on the seat of the time machine - wait,was that herself? It was a version of herself, to be sure, Candace thought, but this one was so identical that it was obviously from either the very recent past or very near future.

"Oops," the new Candace said, gawking at her like an idiot. "Too late." She pressed a button rapidly several times on the time machine and, in a flash of purple light, was gone.

"Weird", said Candace, the sound of her own voice startling her slightly. The Martians cheered upon hearing it. Turning back to the controls, she couldn't hold back a smile. The Martians had really worked on a spaceship for twenty years to travel to earth to rescue their queen? They were awfully trusting, especially of a person who'd done literally nothing except smash a couple of Mars Rovers, and then sing a song with them. Maybe introducing their culture to the concept of music was what had had such a big impact. It kind of saddened Candace to think she'd have to abandon them. Of course, she didn't _have_ to. She could just as easily turn a course for Mars, and live out the rest of her days ruling over the red planet. There was absolutely no one here that would or could stop her from doing such a thing if she decided to do so. But, as attractive as that sounded, she knew she would never do such a thing. Her brothers needed her to save them, and she was going to save them, and hopefully avert her scarring future into something more - well, more pleasant.

  
Candace reached forwards and grabbed ahold of the joystick. Giving it a slight push, she felt the saucer smoothly drift in same direction. Okay, so that was how it worked. Perfect. Time to find the museum.

You might think that a teenager would be woefully ill-prepared to pilot a flying saucer. Now, if it had been anyone except Candace, you would probably be right. But, Candace was a Flynn after all, and she had been in her fair share of spaceships, and had discovered that they were mostly the same. They varied in shape, and size, and color, but for the most part, if you flew one, you could fly them all. Now, Candace wasn't able to work out all of the abilities of the saucer, and was unable to interpret the vast spread of buttons and dials before her. But the basic steering was intuitive enough.  
As she piloted the saucer over Future Danville, the Martians were all standing behind and around her, watching her move the joystick. They seem enraptured by even the slightest of her movements. Candace momentarily wondered why the Martians had taken her, instead of Future Candace. Weren't these Martians twenty years older as well? At first it was odd, but she realized that it made sense in a way - if the Martians had only a picture of her to go by, then how would they know she had aged? Maybe Martians aged differently, or even not at all. They were aliens, after all. It was just dumb luck that she had happened to time travel to this day, right when they were ready to find her.

"They must have been tracking future me", Candace thought with amusement, "But I look just like the picture and future me didn't. At least, she doesn't anymore. No wonder future me was upset."  
The flying saucer traveled much faster than the flying chair. It didn't feel as if it had, but Candace saw the museum below them, and realized that it had indeed. Standing up too quickly, Candace's vision blurred and dimmed, and she collapsed back onto the chair, breathing heavily. The jet lag of time travel was starting to catch up with her. Looking at her phone, she saw that it read 3:11 PM. She'd spent over five hours running all over the place, and traveling through time on an empty stomach. Standing up more slowly this time, Candace willed her suddenly present hunger pangs to go away. Now she needed to tell the Martians that she had to leave them, and was slightly nervous as to how it would go. Turning to face her waiting audience, Candace cleared her throat.

"Uh, I, well I don't know if you can understand me - but I assume you can somewhat, because we did sing that song together on Mars." She paused awkwardly. "I kinda hate to tell you this, especially since I know now that you guys spent like twenty years getting off your planet to come find me. But, uh, I kinda need to go. Partly because this isn't actually my time - I'm from twenty years in the past. But mainly because my brothers are missing. They're the ones you guys thought were kidnapping me, so you did that whole merge-into-one-giant-alien thing."

Candace paused again and studied her audience. Seeing no visible response, she continued "I hate doing this to you guys. I'd really love to go back to Mars with you and be your queen. But, well, I just can't." To help make her point, Candace reached up to her head and removed the crown. That garnered a response. The Martians collectively gasped and opened their multiple eyes widely. She smiled and sat the crown down on the head of the nearest Martian, careful to not touch his antenna.

"There you go", she said, stepping back. "She can be your new queen. Or king - I really don't know how to tell."

Candace turned back to the control panel, and she heard rapidly muttered gibberish from behind her back. Hoping the conversation was one of acceptance, Candace swept her eyes over the various controls. Now which one of them controlled the tractor beam? They were all labeled with various strange symbols, which she assumed were Martian words or letters.  
Candace felt an alien hand tap her on her lower back. Turning, she saw it was the one she had unceremoniously crowned. He extended his lower jaw a freakish amount and and pressed down a few of the jutting teeth, playing a tune. Candace smiled, remembering her surprise at finding out that their entire bodies were basically entirely musical instruments. The tune was one that she recognized.

  
"Yes, I know what I sang. But I really have to go. Can one of you guys make the tractor beam work again? I need to get inside the museum."

  
In response to her request, one of the Martians lept up onto the pilots' seat. Having been designed for her, it was comically too large for him. Pressing a few buttons on the controls, Candace heard the howling sound beginning to sound from outside the ship.

"Wait, guys", she said, as she saw what they were doing, "You don't have to te...tear the roof off. Well, whatever. I suppose I don't have to walk at all now."  
Candace cringed as a resounding crash thundered through the air after the saucer carelessly tossed the museum's roof aside, sending it flying into one of the dilapidated apartment buildings across the street.

Spouting gibberish, the Martians cleared a path for her to walk back onto the pad where she had appeared after originally entering the ship. Stepping onto it, Candace gave a thumbs up, and felt the floor disappearing out from under her. The space ship around her slowly faded out of view, being replaced with the air directly under it. Once again, she was in the howling green tractor beam, levitating in the air. The difference this time, however, was that she was being let down. Bracing her legs for impact, the beam sat her on the museum's tiled floor with a surprising gentleness. The sound ceased and the green light shut off. Candace stood and waved as the saucer circled in the air several times above her head. Suddenly, a hole appeared in the bottom of the saucer, and a Martian tossed a small gray box down at her. Catching it, Candace saw it had one red button on it, covered in what appeared to be a hard plastic cover.

"What does this do...?", she shouted up at the ship. The saucer flashed its lights and then soundlessly rocketed away into the sky, quickly becoming a distant black speck. Shaking her head, Candace jammed the strange box into the pocket with her phone, and turned around. The time machine sat on it's podium behind her. The Martians had put her down right next to it. Stepping over and hauling herself into it, Candace found a surprising amount of comfort in its ratty red seat cushions.

"Alright", she said to herself, "I've got to figure out how to get this thing to move not only in time, but also in space. There's gotta be way."

The time machine's controls were much less complicated than had been the saucer's. After a few minutes of studying, Candace decided that the heretofore untouched by her buttons on the left was a directional steering device. Pressing them, Candace realized they rewound to parts of her life, placing the machine nearby whatever part she rewound to. It was a crude directional steering mechanism for sure, but it would do the trick.

Pressing the buttons until they rewound to about fifteen minutes ago, Candace reached to the right and grabbed the large start lever on the side of the machine. A flash of purple light enveloped her as her molecules were inverted through the space-time continuum. When the light faded, she was... back in the saucer? It was fifteen minutes ago in her life - and the past version of herself was up front piloting the saucer. Turning around, Fifteen-Minutes-Ago Candace cast a questioning gaze on her.

"Oops", said Candace, smiling sheepishly at her past self, "Too late." She spammed the rewind button and pulled the start lever. The purple light of time travel once again swallowed her up.

As the purple light disappeared, Candace looked around and saw that she had pressed the rewind buttons too many times in her haste. The time machine was now sitting behind ... was that Good Future Candace? From her first time traveling trip? Indeed it was. Good Future Candace was sitting on a park bench, headphones on, singing to herself.

 

 

> " _Who's a quantum spacial anomaly? You are!_
> 
> _Who's a quantum spacial anomaly? I am!_
> 
> _I'm the future version of a person who traveled up to meet me;_
> 
> _But they had to mess with time and I became an anomaly!_
> 
> _In the mere blink of an eye my timeline was erased;_
> 
> _Wiped out of the universe without a single trace!_
> 
> _I came out of nowhere and I've got no where to go;_
> 
> _My DNA always denies all my supposed family ties;_
> 
> _Because I'm a temporal paradox, you know?_
> 
> _The folks who were my parents never even thought to birth me;_
> 
> _I just sort of popped in - quite spontaneously!_
> 
> _I suppose that I could settle down, get married, have some kids;_
> 
> _But their family tree would always end with me;_
> 
> _Because you see, quite technically, I really shouldn't even be!_ "

Candace frowned. Good Future Candace was a terrible singer. She was also right - she was a quantum spacial anomaly. After the space-time continuum had been altered by Phineas and Ferb's disappearance, Good Future Candace should have ceased to exist, since the future she was from no longer existed. But, and Candace heard Phineas' voice as she thought this, remembering his lengthy explanation of time travel after the first incident, "Good Future and Bad Future Candace both used a time machine - meaning that they became quantum locked: basically, the timeline can change around them, without changing them, unless something happens that deliberately questions the reasons for their continued existence. That's why Bad Future Candace disappeared when asked if her future no longer existed. Because at one point Bad Future Candace _was_ Good Future Candace, she was just an older version of her."

"Well," Candace thought to herself, "I won't destroy another version of myself. Might as well leave her be." She pressed the buttons again, taking extra caution to ensure that they were set on the correct time and space : Crazy Future Candace's office, directly before Candace had encountered her. For the third time, Candace reached and pulled the time machine's start lever. With a flash, the machine traveled through space and time, stopping once more, inside what appeared to be a closet of some sort.

The closet was dark and dirty, with cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. The door was hanging half open, and Candace stepped out of the time machine and walked over to it to listen in on the conversation going on the room attached to the closet.

"-was the end of my life! No one would believe me! Ha! Look at me now! They believe! They believe now! I made them! And you! I know-"

That was enough. Candace knew where she was: the encounter between herself and her horrifying future self. Looking around, she saw a ragged, grimy cloak laying on the ground. Gagging at the repulsive stench wafting off it, she grabbed it and pulled it over herself. She lay prone on the ground, and slowly, inch by inch, crawled out of the closet until she was less than two feet behind Crazy Future Candace, who had by now finished her rant, and was charging up her silver gun. Looking around, Candace saw no sign of whoever had been here when she had met Crazy Future Candace, but that was probably for the better. There would be no need to fight whomever it had been over the pack on Crazy Future Candace's back when she finally got ahold of it. She reached into her pocket and felt the strange box that the Martians had given her. The button's plastic cover had been jarred open. Had she accidentally pressed the button? Nothing different seemed to be happening however, so she assumed not. Candace was jarred out of her thoughts by a loud rumbling, and the entire building shaking beneath her. Sure enough, right on cue, the Martian saucer ripped off the buildings roof, and hovered above, filling the roofless room with unearthly lights and sounds, as it tractored Candace's past self into itself.

"Nooooo!" Candace heard her future self shout. It was almost time. "Not her! Take me! Me! I can sing it too!" The saucer continued it's tractoring unabated.

"Nooo! They won't! Bwahahahahahha!" Even when she heard it for the second time, her future self's wild raucous laughter, ringing out as she attempted to swallow Past Candace and the saucer with a rift, filled Candace with dread. Was _this_ really her? There was no time to ponder. It was time.

Crazy Future Candace's rift gun's beam had reflected off of the silvery underside surface of the Martian saucer, inadvertently forming the rift beneath her. Candace quickly stood up, reached forwards, and seized the straps holding the pack on Crazy Future Candace's back. Crazy Future Candace was extremely unhealthily skinny, but still weighed a considerable amount more than Candace could reliably support. She staggered forwards, but the straps refused to break. The aged fibers stretched, but would not snap. Crazy Future Candace began flailing her arms and legs about wildly, in a vain attempt to save herself. In her efforts, one of her elbows solidly nailed Candace square in the nose. The sudden rush of pain made Candace stagger back, releasing her hold on the straps, allowing Future Candace to tumble to her doom inside the space-time rift. Tripping over the cloak still disguising her, Candace tumbled onto the ground, clutching her face as blood began streaming from her injured nose. A wave of revulsion filled Candace, as the warm sticky liquid gushed onto her hands and clothing. In the background, she heard the howling of the saucer's tractor beam cease, and heard the spacecraft's engine rev up, then fade as it accelerated into the distance. Kicking away the now bloody cloak, Candace staggered back into the closet where the time machine was waiting.

Nosebleeds had always been an issue for her - they bled for ages and often made her extremely light-headed and prone to fainting before drying up on their own, if they did at all. It was due to a rare but extremely weak version of hereditary thrombocytopenia, a disorder which prevented Candace's blood from clotting large wounds as well as it should. It was weak enough that doctors always said it would only very rarely, if ever become an issue, but she'd been nonetheless prescribed some cheap blood coagulant to be taken if she ever began bleeding severely. The only problem was that the medicine was under the the bathroom sink at home; back in Candace's own time. Blood pouring profusely down her face, Candace rolled up her shirt and pressed it hard against her nose, attempting to stifle the flow. She hauled herself back into the time machine and pressed the buttons quickly. Pulling the time machine's start lever, purple light shone brightly as Candace was dragged back to her own time.

With a flash, and a scream from a surprised family visiting the museum, Candace and the machine materialized successfully in 2017. Already reeling from the pain and loss of blood, trying to climb out of the time machine as quickly as she did was the final straw. Swaying back and forth at the edge of the time machine's display podium, Candace's vision dimmed, and then went black as she went crashing forwards towards the shocked museum visiting family. The husband of the family stepped forwards quickly, and saved her from cracking her head against the hard tiled floor.

"Quick!" he shouted, "Someone call an ambulance!"

"I left my phone in the car!" his wife replied face whitened with fear. " Oh, oh - I got it!" She paused and cleared her throat.

"What, do you think that a phone is just going to fall out of the sky?" She waved her hands in exasperation. A loud crash came echoing from the museum's roof. With a thunk and shower of splinters, a phone flew through the air and landed directly in the palm of her outstretched hand, doing exactly that.

"Thank goodness", she breathed, looking down at it, as she swiftly flipped it open and dialed 9-1-1. Sidestepping to avoid a sudden avalanche of thousands of phones tumbling from the ceiling, she hastily responded to the operator's questions.

That night, the _Daily Danville_ had new breaking local headlines: **BLOODY ACCIDENT AT MUSEUM!** followed closely by **CARGO PLANE SHIPMENT OF NEW PHONES FALLS OUT OF PLANE.**


	3. I Know What We're Going To Do Today!

Candace was not conscious to hear the conversation over the phone, or feel the pressure as the man who'd likely saved her life tore a long piece of cloth off of his shirt and attempted to stem the flow of blood from her face. She didn't hear the wailing of ambulance sirens as the emergency vehicle tore through the streets, or feel the paramedics lift her up onto stretcher. She didn't see her parents weepy, terrified faces when they hurriedly abandoned their previous tasks to go to the hospital. She didn't feel the shots as her bloodstream was pumped full of blood thickener and sleeping medication. She wasn't aware of the commotion when her mother volunteered to be an impromptu blood donor for her comatose daughter. She didn't see the tubes or the machines that transferred the life-sustaining fluid from one body to the next. She couldn't hear the tears as her father attempted to console her mother, even as the doctor said that she had been snatched from the very door of death by the kindly museum visiting family, and talked of how odd it was that it seemed she had been on the receiving end of what seemed to be brutal physical beat down, and wondered how she had appeared from thin air in the museum. Traveling injured through time was incredibly dangerous, she would later find out, but no one assumed that was what she had done. Instead, they sought about for some 'reasonable' solution, though there was none to be found. If only they knew the truth. If only.

* * *

 

"Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!"

The insistent ringing of her alarm clock roused Candace from her deep sleep. How had she gotten home? She attempted to roll over in bed, but was rudely interrupted by a tugging on her arm. Looking down, she saw an IV cable feeding down into it. Blinking, Candace looked around. She wasn't at home after all. Her memories of the previous day came flooding back to her. The beeping that had awoken her wasn't her alarm clock after all. It was a cardiac monitor, and was actually much quieter than it had sounded at first. Struggling into an upright position in the hospital bed, she saw her parents sitting in chairs next to the bed, sleeping soundly. Looking around for some method of telling the time, her eyes finally alighted on the clock on the wall.

  
**1:33 AM, Thursday, September 23, 2017.**

Well, there was the final proof that time had indeed stopped looping. A shudder went through Candace. Summer had finally come to an end. School would be starting next Monday. The last summer had seemed to last forever, although now that it was over, it seemed to have gone by all too fast. It nice to be one hundred percent certain time was flowing, although Candace had never really doubted it - Baljeet's little ... thingy had said the continuum was stable, and she had no reason to doubt him. If anything, she'd trust him over a licensed scientist with a PhD in quantum mechanics, even if that did make him a real nerd. Looking back at her sleeping parents, she suddenly remembered. Her brothers! They were the reason she had ended up in this bed in the first place, why she had gone on that insane adventure through time and space yesterday. Well, this sucked. Not only had she not rescued them, or made any real progress in doing so, but she had thoroughly broken the trust her parents had in her. It would be much more difficult to convince them to let her go out alone again - after she had, from their point of view, disappeared from the face of the earth for over six hours, only to show up bleeding out in the museum.

"No matter", she thought, her resolution to save her brothers still unweakened by the lack of success, "I think I've proven that my future self will be absolutely no help to me. I've guess - I guess that means I've got to do it myself."

Well. She had  _no_ idea how that was going to work. It meant _she'd_ have to build up a space-time rift creator on her own. Her brothers had been the ones who always did this kind of stuff. She did have some of their (well, Phineas') blood in her veins, but that didn't mean she had their talent, did it? Looking over at the bedside table, she saw her phone lying there, blinking with a backlog of text messages and missed phone calls that it had been unable to receive during its trip into the future. Reaching over, she picked it up and opened up her mobile web browser.

  
'how to rip hole in space time continuum' she searched. Everything was on the internet, right? Maybe this wouldn't be so bad.

As it turned out, no. It was that bad. Just about everywhere she looked, she found the same thing : modern understanding of physical space and time meant that there was no continuum to be ripped, and that such a theory was almost certainly absurd. Which was _great_ , considering it implied that Candace would now also have to basically re-write the entire modern scientific communities' understanding of how the universe worked. Such an undertaking would have been child's play to Phineas and Ferb, but seemed quite impossible when she considered it. Phineas had said that the creation of their space-time continuum ripper had required the revolution of twenty-seven modern scientific fields. Candace wasn't sure that she could name twenty-seven distinct fields of science, much less rewrite all of the most generally accepted tenets of scientific knowledge they contained. Where does one even start in a project like that?

Sighing, she searched for 'math equations for space time' and pulled up an article on something called Einsteinian field equations, which was filled with what seemed like nonsense gibberish. Was this the stuff she was supposed to rewrite? She could hardly read it at all, as it was right now. Studying the cryptic strings of letters and numbers and punctuation, Candace felt strange feelings stirring up inside of her. She felt as if she could almost grasp it, but not quite. There was some sort of mental block that prevented her from truly getting a hold of the complex things on the screen in front of her. Even that feeling was odd, considering she'd never seen these things before in her life.

Rolling her eyes, she shut off her phone and sat it back on the table. It was almost two in the morning, she should be sleeping, not puzzling over the laws of the universe. Sliding back into a lying position, Candace wondered what her life had come to. Closing her eyes, she realized that she didn't care what it had come to, or what it ended up like. She just needed her brothers back. Once they were back, everything could go back to normal. The beeping of the cardiac monitor seemed to become a lullaby, enticing her mind to shut down.

 

"Tomorrow", she thought drowsily, "tomorrow I do quantum mechanics and field theory. Ugh, I'm becoming a nerd." Then she was swallowed by the deep, dark, warm, embrace of sleep.

* * *

 

Candace was roused the next morning by a nurse, who was checking the various screens and monitors keeping track of her vitals.

"Oh, honey", she apologized when she saw Candace's eyes open. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you up."

"It's okay, I was already up", Candace lied. She sat up in bed and let out a yawn, stretching. "Do you know when I can go home?"

The nurse smiled. "Probably today, but the doctor will have the final say on that." A questioning streak shot across her otherwise sunny features. "What happened to you anyway?" she asked, after an all-to-obvious moment of internal deliberation.

Candace didn't answer immediately. She couldn't tell anyone about the time machine, they'd never believe her, think she was delusional, and prevent her from going home. If her own mother never believed her stories, what were the odds a complete stranger would? No, that'd never work. She needed to get home - she had science to do, natural laws to re-write, and brothers to save. Somehow.

"I fell", she replied after a second. The moment the lie was out of her mouth, she latched onto it it, determined to sell it as cold, hard truth. "I tripped and hit myself on a museum exhibit and started bleeding. I tried to get help, but, I guess I passed out."

"Well, I'll go get your parents", the nurse said, as she stepped out of the room , "They're down in the cafeteria getting breakfast."

Relieved that she at least appeared to have bought the entirely fabricated story, Candace nodded and stretched again. She reached over and grabbed her phone again, this time looking at her text messages. The expected worried messages from her parents were there, and there were also some from Stacy and Jeremy. Guilt sliced through her as she realized she'd completely forgotten about her best friend and boyfriend. Surely they were worried too? Even then, however, the guilt wasn't extremely strong or deep-cutting. Perhaps without her realization, Candace's subconscious was internally separating her from everyone, untangling the threads of her emotion from the grasp of others. Candace felt as if she was in a parallel dimension, and the mere fact that no one but her could remember her brothers did so much to divorce her from everyone else. Even when she had been floating alone in deep space, she hadn't felt so alone. It was as if everyone else was a mere image, a flat representation of who they had been before. It was like everyone in her life had been replaced with their doppelgangers : people that looked and acted like they did before, but just _felt_ different. In the deepest part of her soul, Candace was struggling with the idea that everyone was a fake, a fraud, a shadow of whomever they had been before. It was the worst with the people her feelings ran deepest for. Even though she knew that biologically and legally, Linda Flynn-Fletcher was her mother, and that she was still entirely the same person, the fact that in this, strange, strange timeline, she hadn't birthed one of Candace's two little brothers, hadn't even thought to, and didn't even remember their existence drove an immovable wedge between Candace and her mother, between her and the rest of the world. That first frantic half-hour, when Candace had been running all over the neighborhood, introducing herself to her brothers friends, had hammered in the wedge to some great degree. The blank looks in their eyes, the casual "Are you not an only child?", the complete forgetting of the children that had previously played such a major role in their lives, was now coming back to her like a powerful blast of realization. In this world - this version of the world - she was different.

Only she could remember the time loops, and the people they had swallowed. No one was there for her. No one could be there. If some great tragedy had befallen them - if mindlessly tearing the laws of the universe to shreds had finally caught up to her brothers - if their rocket ship had blown up or they had been flattened by a industrial accident, it would have been better. Candace shuddered at the mere thought of her innocent brothers coming to such a gruesome end. But she couldn't deny it. Had sudden lightning strike, a great calamity, suddenly struck down her brothers, her heart would have shattered. Her world would permanently scarred, never to entirely heal. But it wouldn't have been the end. She would have her friends and family to mourn with. There would have been a funeral, there would have been two headstones, there would have been two small, fresh grave plots in the local cemetery. Candace felt tears welling up in her eyes, as her mind forced her unwillingly through this painful realization.

Even that would not have been the end. Time would flow, and the deep wounds would scab over. Deep scars would form, and the pain would lessen. At long last, it would cease, dulled out by the passage of time. And even then, there would be memories. Scrapbooks, blueprints, pictures, and stuff they used to own. With the help of her family, friends, and boyfriend, she would have picked up the pieces of her broken heart and stuck them back together. She would have put on a brave face and continued with life. Candace could no longer hold herself back, and broke down in tears.

  
But here, now, there was no one. No one! Nothing but her. She was alone, forced to deal with it all by herself - unable to make public even the slightest show of remorse for her brother's loss, for fear of being labelled delusional. She didn't even know if they were still alive. In the dark, scary parts of her mind, she had already begun steeling herself to bear the harsh truth that they weren't. But until she found out for sure, she wouldn't accept that. No way. She would bring them back, from wherever they were, and everyone would remember them then. At long last, Candace would find peace, once again able to confide in the people she was supposed to be close with.

The tears poured fast and thick, out from behind her hands and onto her hair and blankets. It was a deeply painful thing to think about. She had never dealt with a real loss before. The closest thing she'd dealt with was Jeremy's supposed breakup with her. But that had been fake - conjured up by her overactive imagination. Now, for the first time, Candace was dealing with a very real loss. And she was unable to comfort or solace with anyone. She was forced to turn inward for peace, and she found none. It was things like these that made her feel so weak. If anyone else had been in her shoes, Candace felt they would be able to better handle it. She just wasn't ready to accept it, to live out the rest of her days in this horrid alternate existence without her brothers. She would bring them back, she had to. Even if she was only able to bring back memories and corpses, it would be better than ... than this. Candace shuddered, but the tears had dried and she had begun the long, quiet process of building walls around her heart, even further shutting out the world. She was determined. No matter what it took, no matter what, she would bring them back. Alive or dead, it almost mattered not. She just needed the world to believe her. Just like that, it was decided. Her mind was made up, set like cement in the sun. No force in earth or heaven would sway her resolve. It was too late. The time for changing her mind had passed. Now was the time for action. She had a goal, and she had all the motivation in the world to reach said goal. It was up to her now. It was up to her.

Sniffling, and wiping away the traces of her weeping from under her eyes, Candace sat up straighter in her bed.

"First things first", she thought, with a distant coldness ringing out her mind that would have shocked anyone who knew her, "Get out of this hospital." That meant being discharged - or escaping. If the doctor gave her a clean bill of health, she'd be good. If not, well, so be it. The door to her room swung open, and Candace's parents' and a doctor walked in. Her eyes narrowed slightly. These were not her parents. They were strangers - forced upon her by a broken space-time continuum. It was up to Candace to bring her real parents back.

  
Her parents rushed forwards, almost trampling the doctor in their haste to be at the bedside.

"Hey, Mom, Hey, Dad", Candace superficially greeted, but the emotion was gone. Nevertheless, they were far too worried to hear the frigid new quality their daughter's tone had taken on, to see the hardened look in her eyes.

"Omygosh!", her mother rushed out, "What happened? Are you okay? You're in so much trouble, I swear! If you wanted to go to the museum you could've gone! What happened to your phone all day? No one could get in touch with you?"

Her father placed a gentle hand on her mom's shoulder.

"We are both just glad you are okay", Lawrence said, smiling at her in a fatherly sort of way, a way that now served only to make Candace uncomfortable. It didn't feel natural anymore. Nothing did.

"Can I go home?" she finally asked, tearing her eyes away from her parents and looking pointedly at the doctor. He smiled, and flipped over a few pages on his clipboard.

"Well", he said at last, "It's been told to me that you tripped and struck your face, which is what caused your injury?"

Candace nodded. That was her story, and she was sticking to it.

"Honestly", he said, "I see no reason to keep you longer after last night. Your condition is extremely weak, and so should only very rarely be an issue. Your mother has said you do have coagulant at home, and you seem to be entirely stable, so I'll just say this: Be more careful in the future! But, yes. Yes, you can go home."

A nurse bustled in and began the process of pulling out the IV in Candace's arm. She gave Candace a new set of clothes her parents had brought from home, and helped her to feet. After getting a feel for being back up, Candace walked to the bathroom and quickly changed from the hospital gown into her regular clothes. The strange device the Martians had given to her was still here. She studied it more carefully under the yellow glow of the bathroom light. It was a simple thing, a small box with a single red button. But what did it do? Part of her wanted to just press the button and find out. But, a more logical side of her told her, _no_ , that was a bad idea. Rubbing her thumb over the smooth glossy surface of the small box, she at last returned it to its place in her pocket.

  
She could hear the doctor conversing with her parents outside. Having been to the doctor before for reasons just such as this, Candace knew fairly well what the conversation would consist of, and how long it would be. She had to get out of the hospital sooner, but how? Sliding her phone into her pocket and folding the hospital gown in half, Candace swung open the bathroom door.

"Is it okay if I walk home from here?" she asked, interrupting.

"No!", her mother exclaimed. Darn. She had assumed as much. The thought of standing directly up to her parents - even if they weren't really her parents - still didn't sit well with her. There was, however, one other option.

"Plllleeeeeeaaassse..." Candace drawled. "I know the way home and it's way shorter than the distance from our house to the mall." Candace could sense her mother about to disapprove again, so she continued swiftly.

"This has happened before, you know, and there's never any reason to not go back to my normal stuff", she said, "Unless I feel dizzy, which I don't, I swear!" To prove her point, Candace swiftly spun in place a few times. An unwise decision, as it brought up waves of nausea and she could feel the contents of her stomach threatening to boil out the wrong way. Swallowing hard and fighting back the wooziness, Candace put on a fake smile and continued. "Besides I'm hungry and want to get home so I can eat. You guys know you'll be another good hour before the paperwork is done."

Her mother opened her mouth again, but her father interrupted this time.

"It's alright", he said, his soft British voice sounding frighteningly similar to another one Candace missed. "I'll drive her home and then drive back. I'll be back before you know it."

Linda Flynn-Fletcher's somewhat stern face expression almost instantly melted. "Oh, alright", she relented. "If you insist."

"Come on Candace", Lawrence said, opening the hospital room's door and motioning for her to exit. Her mother said goodbye and then returned to the discussion with the doctor.

  
The ride home was a silent one. Her father asked a few questions about where she had been, what had happened, but Candace resolutely stuck to her story, and offered up a phony excuse of hunger when she couldn't quite explain why no one had been able to contact her for almost six hours.

The trip was a short one. As her father pulled the small red station wagon into the driveway, the empty backyard smote Candace like a bullet, further fueling her present state of mind. There was no ride, no invention, no rockets, no brothers, no...no nothing. Only the one tree still stood in the backyard, looking naked without two young boys leaning against its trunk. Waving goodbye to her father as he dropped her off and pulled out, headed back to the hospital, Candace reluctantly turned and headed into the house. Any previously present feeling of hunger melted away as the door banged behind her, granting her admission into the house. The house was so quiet, so empty. The feelings of grief threatened to bubble up again. Once again, Candace felt herself breaking down, with no one, not even her best friends for life, to turn to. She stamped on her own foot, hard, the spurt of pain snapping her back out of the precarious situation she almost found herself in.

"There's no need to be sad", she sharply told herself, "My brothers will be fine. They always are. I just have to bring them back." The possibility that somehow, somewhere, her brothers would not be fine, was still in her mind. Candace just refused to vocalize it to herself.

Suddenly raising her voice, Candace shouted into the empty house. "PHINEAS AND FERB, YOU ARE SOOOOO BUSTED!" Only echoes responded, "Busted...busted...busted."

Then _silence._ Silence as deep as that of a tomb. If only there was a tomb. A headstone, a bucket of ashes. Something cold, hard, and real to remember her brothers by. More than anything at that moment, Candace simply wanted someone she could confide in, could pour out her thoughts and feelings. But there was no one. And if she never brought her brothers back, there never would be. That particular thought filled her with resolve, and not the happy resolve to do good; but a cold, distant resolve that would stop at no barriers to achieve its goal. The idea of bringing her brothers back alive had dimmed slightly in her mind. She really just wanted people to remember them. Whether they were alive or dead was almost besides the point. She just didn't want to feel so alone in the world.

  
Candace determinedly trudged through the house and up the stairs to her room. All she had to do was a little work, a little inventing - and she could have them back. Her brothers did this stuff everyday. How hard could it be, really?

Opening her dresser drawer, Candace pulled out a notebook and pencil. They had been intended for use in school, but school didn't matter now. She flopped down across her bed with them and slid her phone out of her pocket. Re-producing the website filled with space-time math equations, she carefully transcribed them onto the first page of the notebook. Then she stared at them.

And how she stared. The same feeling from the hospital bed that night began stirring once more in her mind. But once again, the same as before, they amounted to nothing. The penciled equations were like an unsolvable puzzle, with the solution always just out of reach. Try as she might, Candace didn't even know where to begin. But still she stared. And stared so hard the patterns began to burn themselves into her brain. She didn't pay attention to the passing of time, to her parents coming home from the hospital. She didn't hear her own voice when it mumbled out the excuse that she was doing some studying to prepare herself for school. Her stomach lay empty inside of her, yet her brain shut out the incessant signals of hunger. Dinner time came and went, and the pangs ceased.

"I'm not hungry", she told her mother, when she came up to offer her some food, eyes never leaving the notebook. The clock ticked onwards. Evening shifted into night, and midnight began fast approaching. Still Candace stared, unsleeping, not giving a thought to her drowsiness. Her bladder rebelled against her, rapidly filling to the brim, but still she willed it into submission and continued staring, drilling the math into her mind. The answer was there, butshe just wasn't seeing it, and that fact drove her mad. She was going to solve the puzzle, going to work out the math, going to devise a working theory of space-time that would allow for a discrete space-time continuum, and going to find out how to tear it. She would do it if it killed her. The clock ticked onwards, minutes melding into hours as she lay on the bed, poring over the page, even in the dark. Midnight came, and a new day dawned. Her throat dry, eyes fatigued, bladder begging for relief, stomach crying out anew for sustenance, Candace still lay, unmoving, on her bed. The pencil she had pulled out had long since been snapped in two under the intensity of her grasp. What was she expecting? She wasn't exactly sure herself. An epiphany, perhaps, a sudden inspiration and understanding of the equations before her. She could feel the realization beating at the door, but that door was locked, and try as she might, she wasn't able to find the key. But it wouldn't be for lack of trying. She wouldn't give up. She couldn't. She wasn't doing this for herself. She was doing it for her brothers - for Phineas and Ferb. They needed her, needed saving. She would do it! She would bring them back into time and space. And then everyone would believe her, would remember them.

As the early light of the fresh, new day crept into the room, it lit upon Candace, unmoved. Eyes red and baggy, mind foggy and exhausted, body begging for repose, but still unmoved. Some things were more important. The calculations began swimming back and forth on the paper. Candace blinked, but her eyes refused to focus. She had to do it, just had to! Why couldn't she? Why? Why? With a sudden spurt of wrath, moving more than she had in hours, she flung the notebook away from her, listening as it thumped against the wall and plopped onto the floor. Tears filled her eyes. Why couldn't she do it? This was the one way she could resolve the situation, and here she was, entirely unable to do it. What gave? She was such a failure!

Suddenly, her tearful introspection was shattered by a voice. A voice not belonging to either of her parents, nor anyone in Danville for that matter, but nevertheless well known to Candace's grieving mind.

"Kevin", it said, both suave and creepy at the same time.

A cloven hoof was placed on her shoulder, and Candace turned her discouraged gaze to her new companion. Or had he always been there? She didn't know. The zebra's other hoof clutched a picket sign, leaned across its shoulder. "VOTE KEVIN", it boldly declared.

"Why?", Candace almost yelled, voice cracking. "Why can't I do it? Why?"

"Kevin", the zebra said after a moment, "I voted for you, you know. And I will vote for you every time you run. Do you know why?"

Sobbing, Candace shook her head.

"It's not because you are perfect - you know that. It's because I see potential in you. I know you can do anything you set your mind to. When you set your mind to fully achieving your elected duties, you did it to the degree no one ever saw before. And that is why I'll always vote for you."

"But-but-but-but", Candace stammered out, "I've tried! I can't! It's been - sixteen hours! Why can't I do it?!"

"You can", the animal replied, twitching its tail. "And you will - because you need to save your brothers. And to get everyone to remember them again. And I know you. I saw your performance during the race. I know you can do it, Kevin."

Candace sniffled. "You really think I can?"

"I know it, Kevin. Besides, " and the zebra smiled and pointed with the picket sign at the notebook lying listlessly on the floor, "You already have."

"What?" Candace turned to the notebook with a start. Even from across the room, she could see the equations. And all of the sudden, the zebra was _right_. She could see it! She had gotten it! The math seemed to fly off the page and into her brain, as her teenaged brain suddenly grasped the deepest secrets of the universe.

"Thank you!" Candace looked back at the zebra, tears pouring out of her eyes, the dam having been breached at last. "Thank you!" But the zebra was gone. Her room was empty. Even then, however, Candace heard his voice.

"I voted for you, Kevin. Now get out there and earn it."

For a long while, Candace didn't move. She laid uncontrollably convulsing on her bed, weeping as she had never wept before. She had done it. Her brothers were as good as back, as good as remembered. As good as ---.

* * *

 

When Lawrence Fletcher poked his head into his daughter's room at eight in the morning that day, he saw her, lying curled up on top of the covers snoring loudly, cheeks and bedding stained from tears.

"Teenage drama", he chuckled to himself. Pulling a blanket from the top of her closet, he gently covered her up, then snuck back out to breakfast, content everything was alright.

At ten o'clock, Candace's eyes snapped open, intensely aware of a gnawing hunger in her stomach, and dry scratchiness in her throat. Curiously enough, her urge to relieve herself had abated during the night. Shaking off a blanket that was now on top of her, Candace spied a note lying next to her on the bed. It was from her mother.

_Candace,_  
_I didn't have the heart to wake you, so I'm leaving this note instead. Your father and I are headed to the antiquing convention today, so we will be home around three. Remember school starts Monday, so make doubly sure you have everything you need._  
_Love, Mom_

Crumpling the note into a small ball, Candace tossed it onto her floor. She walked downstairs, and into the kitchen. Poking around, she ravenously devoured an immense amount of cereal and milk, slurping it straight from the bowl, not in the mood for struggling with a fork. Leaving the dirty dishes behind her in the sink, she resolutely returned to her room and retrieved her notebook from its place on the floor. Her sudden realization from the preceding night had passed, and once again, the complex equations were unintelligible, but her diligence had been kindled anew. She  _could do this_. Sitting down on the floor, she found the pencil she had broken and used the front half to scribble over the entire page. Then she tore it out, and threw it across the room.

Taking a deep breath, Candace took a the half-pencil and carefully inscribed 'Space-Time' across the top of the page. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the universe in her mind. Tried to picture infinity, to picture everything and nothing at the same time. She would begin at the beginning, as if she was rediscovering everything. A thought hit her. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

  
She wrote " _6.67408 × 10^11 m3 kg^1 s^2_ " down on the paper, near the top of the sheet. It was the universal gravitational constant. Candace wasn't sure exactly how she knew that. But, having seen gravity's effects her whole life, what else could it be? The number seemed to be the key to her mind. Now it was just required to write out how that number was related to space, to time, to matter. To everything. Candace was going to develop a Theory of Everything. She sat for a minute drumming the pencil against the notebook. Or maybe it was an hour. Her mind was filled with mind-boggling thoughts, things and theorems that would drive most physicists insane.

She needed to come to an understanding of infinity.

Then it came. There wasn't a halo of light, there were no angelic choirs. But she had gotten it. She understood it. She understood everything. Was this how Phineas and Ferb felt? Knowing all the secrets of the universe, and how to break them? Knowing how to manipulate the universe to do whatever you wished? Knowing how everything worked, down to the last atom? No matter. She had her breakthrough. Now it was time to write it down.

She began writing. All to soon, the page was filled. No matter. Candace tore the full sheet at and sat it gently down next to her, then continued writing. Information flowed from her, an infinity of knowledge pouring from her mind onto the paper before her. The equations she was writing were the most complex mathematics in the universe. They had to be: they encompassed everything, explaining in detail how every last bit of the universe worked together, how space and time did indeed form a discrete, tearable fabric, how Boyle's law about temperature, pressure, volume proved the existence of other dimensional realities. Another page filled. And another. And another. Her pencil was worn down to a stub, as she rapidly penned down all the knowledge in the universe. Tossing aside the useless stub, she broke open her school supplies. Notebook after notebook were filled, pencil after pencil worn down to ferrules. She was uncomprehending of the passing of time. Why should she be? She completely understood time now. How it flowed, and how it could be stopped. Or reversed. Or traveled through. There were twenty-five notebooks with a hundred pages each in her school supply bin. At precisely 2:13 PM, Candace had filled every last one of them. She needed more - more writing supplies. Rushing downstairs, she pulled open the cupboard in which was stored the Flynn-Fletcher family's printer supplies. 2500 perfectly blank pages lay there, calling out to her, beckoning to be filled with her absolute knowledge of the innermost workings of everything. Heaving the stack back up to her room, She rapidly began filling.

General Relativity : horribly flawed. Special relativity : entirely false. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle : easily disproven, if you just knew where to look. She laughed at Einstein's feeble attempts to understand the speed of light, at the entirely untrue belief that one could never reach speeds beyond it. Chemistry, biology, physics, quantum mechanics, acoustics, aeronautics, astrophysics, cosmology, cardiology, horology, mechanics, meteorology, metrology, neurology, nucleonics, optics, spectroscopy, thermodynamics, physiology, hydrology, electrology, astrometeorology, astronomy, astrophysics, astroseismology, atmology, and audiology. These were the twenty-seven fields of science that needed updating to allow for a continuous space-time continuum. These were the fields Phineas had mentioned. As Candace scribbled out equations that redefined these fields, she trembled uncontrollably. She had infinite knowledge now. She could do _whatever_ she wanted. A roller coaster, perhaps. Or a super computer that accurately predicted the future. A hyper-photonic rocket ship. Instantaneous teleportation. Anything at all.  _Anything_.

She heard the garage door rumbling open downstairs. Her parents where home. She didn't care. Her mind was swallowed up in the universe, swimming in the boundless knowledge opened up to her. Even as her parents walked in, she kept writing, now on her seventh pencil. Well over half of the stack of printer paper Candace had appropriated for herself was gone: covered front and back in her new all-inclusive theory of everything. Still she wasn't done.  
But as she was explaining the connection between the paths electron clouds chose in orbit and why magnetic poles always repelled each other, and how one could create a monopole magnet if one so desired, she was rudely interrupted.

"Candace Gertrude Flynn!" her mother exclaimed, glancing into her room. "What in the... what is going on?"

And indeed the state of her room, or the state of Candace herself might have seemed shocking. There were papers everywhere, stack on each other, notebooks piled in the corner, and a large binder labelled "Explaining Cold Fusion" lying open on her bed. Dulled pencils lay on the floor, wood shavings scattered about the carpet. A large whiteboard Candace had taken from the garage leaned against the wall, covered in a concept for a hyper-light speed rocket ship engine. A toolbox lie overturned nearby, the contents scattered about on the floor. Her clothes were rumpled, hair was ridiculously unkempt and teeth were yellowing from lack of upkeep.

"What in goodness' name is going on in here?" Her mother stated, face marked with surprise when no answer was immediately forthcoming.

"Eh," Candace stammered out. What now? Her mother - then it hit Candace. This woman wasn't Candace's mother. How could she be? Candace's mother had three children. She had birthed a little boy, had married a man with another. This - this stranger was some poser, someone passed off on her by the universe as it attempted to erase her brothers from the universe.

"Not now, universe", she thought, her face broadening into a smile. She had laid the universe bare, unraveled its workings. She was the master now. Who cared what any of these people thought of her? Once she brought her brothers, they would remember and the people she knew would be back. She cleared her throat.

"I'm working on a project", she said aloud. "It's for...school." Still, there was no use in getting in a conflict if it could be avoided.

"School?" her mother said, tasting the word, obviously not buying the feeble excuse. "And why would you have a school project a week before school starts?"

"Okay", Candace relented, "It's not for school. It's for ... fun."

"Fun?" her mother echoed. Candace rolled her eyes. Whatever. Maybe she should just tell the truth, if it would get her out of her hair. Well, not the whole truth. Perhaps a smidgen of it.

"I'm reworking all scientific knowledge of everything so I can build a device capable of tearing a hole in space and time so that I can... join the science club at school. I'm super interested in science now. How have you not known this?"

Her mother's eyes narrowed slightly.

"Candace", Linda Flynn-Fletcher said slowly, "You're not - not doing anything - there's nothing you need to tell me, right?"

Great. Now she was under the suspicion of being a junkie. Who needed psychoactive substances when the entire universe was at your disposal? Candace could quite literally twist existence into whatever shape she wanted, why would she need drugs?

"No, _mother_ ", she said, spitting the word out as if it physically pained her to do so. "I'm no substance abuser."

"Well" her mother said, then paused. " I'm sorry for asking that, it's just, I mean, come on, honey. Your room is a pigpen. Clean your room - and yourself - up, then come downstairs. It's almost dinner time. I'm going to go get your father." Her mother swept her eyes around the littered room, then turned abruptly and strode away.

That hadn't gone particularly well. But still, the conversation rebounded harmlessly off Candace for the most part. It hadn't felt like she was being disciplined by a parent. It felt more like she was being scolded by a stranger. Looking around her room, she knew she had to do something. She couldn't allow her work to be destroyed. And she didn't feel like going down to eat dinner, not now, not when she was almost down putting down the information she needed to save her brothers.

"Forget this" she thought, attempting to justify her attitude to herself, "They're jokes. Fakes. Perpetuated on me by a scarred space-time continuum. I need my real parents back." Candace heard feet traveling up and down the stairs as she sat back down on the floor and resumed her writing. She heard voices downstairs, asking about her, and her father talking, and before long, her mother came back up to get Candace for dinner.

"Candace-! I said to clean up this room!" she exclaimed, upon seeing it still in the same poor state.

"Sorry" Candace offered, "I'll do it, I promise just give me one second."

Her mother rolled her eyes. "Just come on down to dinner. You can clean up this mess after we eat."

"I'm not hungry", Candace replied.

"Not hungry?"

"Nope."

"Well... I don't want you going down to eat in the middle of the night because you are suddenly hungry then."

"I won't. I promise."

"Well, I guess it is your choice. Do you not feel well?"

"No, I'm fine. Just not hungry. It's okay, I'll - I'll clean my room."

"I suppose that's alright. Okay, then. Are you sure?"

"Yes."

Her mother waited for another moment, then returned downstairs.

Candace blocked out the noise and got back to work. She had a universe to unravel, and there was no better time than the present.

* * *

 

"Ferb, I know what we are going to do today!" I said, as my brother and I began pulling down our rocket hoverboards from their shelf in the garage.

It was the last day of summer, and I was determined to make it the best day ever. I was still unsure of what we would build today, but rest assured, it would be the most awesome thing ever. Maybe we would devise a system for remembering everything.

I strapped my helmet on, and leaned down to fasten the straps that would keep my feet solidly connected to the board while we flew through the air over Danville. The weather was perfect for flight - sunny, warm, with scattered clouds to make cloud angels in. Just moments before we took off, however, we were interrupted by our older sister. I was personally surprised she had even gotten out of the house so early. Maybe she wanted to come with us on our last-day-of-summer extravaganza? That would really put our plans over the top. Just the thought made me smile.

"Wait!" she yelled. Not a minute later, she threw open the sliding glass door and sprinted across the lawn. Her face was red, and her breath was coming out in puffs, as if she had sprinted here all the way from her room.

"I've-got-something-very-important-to-tell-the-both-of-you." she huffed out, not stopping to breathe. She paused, glancing up into the sky, face twisting up like that of a person attempting to remember something.

At last she said, "There's a tree growing on the beach. It's coconuts are out of reach. The sand around is white like bleach. You hear a bird above loudly screech."

Dang, that was surprising. You see, that little ditty is mine and Ferb's time travel passphrase. We've done a bit of time traveling in our ... time ... and it never hurts to have something to verify if that old guy is really the future version of you, or is just somebody trying to pull a fast one. The crazy part about Candace saying it though, was that Ferb and I had never told her! It meant that Candace wasn't really Candace - she must be a time traveler, or perhaps an alien had possessed her body? I glanced back at Ferb, but could see in his eyes that he knew no more than I did about which (if either) was the truth.

"Is it really you, Candace?" I asked. "What time are you from? Do you need something? Where is your time machine?"

If it was a case of alien possession, I would probably be a bit upset. I very pointedly asked all the aliens we came into contact with to avoid possessing our friends and family. We'd be more than happy to build them a robotic host body if they wanted one so badly. As it turned out though, I was wrong on all counts.

"I don't have a time machine", she answered. "I'm existing outside of an unstable time loop. There are rifts opening in space, devouring matter, and only I can perceive the fact that the twenty-four hours in this day are endlessly repeating.

Whoa. Time loops are pretty cool. Unstable time loops, slightly less so, but still kind of neat.

"Hmm", I said. "Unstable time loop, huh? Sounds easy enough to detect. Ferb, we'll need some pizzazium infinionite. I call the Super-"

That was when things really went haywire. I heard this weird sort of shrieking sound suddenly burst from the air behind me. A powerful current of air suddenly swept me off my feet. Instead of just falling over into the grass, though, I fell through a hole - and not any normal hole. A hole in space and time! Yeah, you read that right. A space-time rift just opened up behind Ferb and I and pulled us into it. My statement about calling the Superduper Mega Superstore went unfinished.

It felt like we were falling for a really long time. You might expect everything beyond space and time to be black, but that actually isn't the case. Instead everything is very, very gray.

With a thud, I landed on the ground, and Ferb next to me. Sitting up, I looked around. Like I said before, It was very gray. It was like we were in the middle of Danville, but all the buildings and roads and streetlights and trees were the same monotone gray. The sky above us was misty and also gray. Basically, everything was gray. It was a veritable monochrome dimension, the likes of which I had never seen before.

My attention was slowly drawn to a thin metal object lying on the ground next to me. At first, I couldn't comprehend what it was, or what it was for. Reaching out and picking it up, intending to look at it more closely, a rush of memories suddenly poured into my mind. Of course! It was a spoon.

The spoon was here first - it had fallen through a rift before we had, meaning everyone, including me, had forgotten all about them. Looking around, I saw tons of spoons lying everywhere. Apparently every spoon in the entire universe was here. There were other things as well. Piles of capri pants and elastic suspenders dotted the streets. A few turkey basters were scattered about. Oranges were also everywhere, providing a delightful splash of bright color to the otherwise dull gray ... everything.

"Well Ferb", I said, reaching down and picking up an orange, "Orange you glad we have something to eat?"

A sudden loud roar rang like a thunderclap through the air. It would seem that we weren't alone here.

"Well," I said, "Whatever that was, let's hope it likes oranges."

Ferb looked at me, rolling his eyes.

"Or at least orange-related puns." he said.

Tossing him the orange, I laughed. He was such a joker sometimes.

"Come on" I said, "It seems Candace was right about unstable time loops and temporal rifts."

Ferb looked at me, his glance saying: _Thank you, Captain Obvious_.

"Well, it was just a statement of fact", I said, picking up another orange and chucking it in his general direction. He caught it.

Just then, the same sound that I had heard when the rift had swallowed us before, began sounding again. Looking up into the sky, I saw dozens and dozens of rifts flash open. Toothpicks began raining out, piling up on the ground. Easily thousands of them had poured out before the rifts snapped shut with a noise rivaling that of a thunderclap.

"We can't stay here forever" I said, reaching up and pulling a toothpick out of my hair. As I looked at it, an idea popped into my mind.

"Hey Ferb, I know what we are going to do instead today!" It was time for seize the day. After all, why wait to be rescued when you can rescue yourself, and have fun doing it?

Ferb and I collected tons and tons of toothpicks and piled them up in a huge pile in the middle of the replica street. Once the pile was of reasonable size, I knelt down on the ground and picked up the biggest, fattest one I could find. This was going to be the hardest part. I touched one end of the pick to the top of the pile and held the other in between my hands.

Spinning the toothpick rapidly between my palms for several minutes, at last the smell of smoke wafted up to my nose. Almost there. A few minutes later, and I could feel the pick growing warm in my hands. Just a little bit more. At last, the wooden picks underneath began sparking, and the tiniest of fires was born.

From behind, Ferb handed me a pair of capris. Glancing at the tag, I saw that they were 100% cotton. Perfect! Taking care not to suffocate the miniature flame, I carefully laid out the pants around it, and gently blew the fire in the right direction.

A few more minutes of patient waiting saw complete success. The fire grew rapidly, consuming our stockpile of toothpicks, and took to the cotton fabric with vigor, glowing brightly and warmly as it consumed the pants we fed it. Once it reached a high enough temperature, we stopped giving it cotton pants and instead started tossing in ones made of polyester. The artificial fabric is more resistant to burning, but once ignited burns fiercely and with a vengeance.

We used the spoons to scrape out a large rectangular hole in the ground. The ground was hard, but brittle, and so made this part easy by comparison. The hole was wide and long, but only a fraction of an inch deep.

From there, Ferb and I took to collecting turkey basters. We pulled the rubber parts off until only the plastic parts were remaining. Carefully pushing the plastic tubing close to the now-vigorously blazing bonfire, we laid out a trail of pants on the ground, leading the fire around until it had entirely encircled the hole filled with baster tubes. Looking through the flames, we saw the plastic gradually begin to soften, then melt, until it ran slowly down and filled our hole. We ceased adding more fuel to the ring of fire, and it slowly died, leaving the hole behind, now evenly filled with molten plastic.

The next step involved just a bit of waiting. We squeezed some oranges out over the puddle of plastic, to help speed the hardening process, but orange juice isn't that great of a coolant regardless. Nevertheless, it gradually solidified and eventually cooled enough to be handled. We repeated this process multiple times until we had six sheets of plastic. We carefully set the plastic boards up around our fire, arranging them in just such a manner as to more intensely direct the heat of the flames at a few more crude molds we had dug out in the ground.

Our next melting project was no mere baster. It was spoons - the steel which formed them would be infinitely useful to us, allowing us to create all manner of things. The spoons, of course, had a higher melting temperature than the plastic basters, but our make-shift forge would allow us to overcome that obstacle. We tossed many spoons into the holes we had dug, and then just sat and waited for a little bit of time, eating oranges and fueling the fire as necessary.

"So, Ferb" I asked, as we watched the flames, the entrancing dances they performed soothing to mind and soul.

He raised an eyebrow.

"What are we going to build to get us out of here?"

He said nothing, of course, but I could easily read the reply in his face.

"Yeah, you're right. We still haven't figured out the secret to artificially synthesizing Pizzazium Infinionite, and that'll be necessary to rip space-time again." I rubbed my chin.

"Perhaps we can build the world's biggest negative mass generator."

His look at me was eloquent.

"True, true. We don't need to bend space and time, we need to rip it. But how can we do that without Pizzazium?" It was a puzzle to be sure.

"Well," I said after a moment's thought, "It looks like our goal is to finally crack the secret to synethsization of Pizzazium. Sounds fun." I paused for a moment. "Ferb, I know what we are going to do ... well, there really is no day or night here, is there? I guess I know what we are going to do from this point onwards!"

I smiled at Ferb, and he smiled back. I reached into my pocket and produced my phone. Of course, there was no signal to be found, but the clock read 11:47 AM.

"Hmm" I added. "We should also build a charging station for this. That way, we can keep track of how much time has passed in reality, since there's obviously no time here." I stood up and stretched, looking over at our plastic forge. The holes were no longer filled with piles of spoons. Instead, white-hot liquid metal had filled them to the brim. Perfect!

We moved the fire away from the puddles, and let them cool. It took time, of course, but we had all the time in the world. Or no time at all, depending on how you look at it.

Soon enough, though, the metal cooled and hardened, allowing us to pry our new creations from the ground. Metal tools are really a blessing, you know, and they're really something that you for granted.

We upgraded our forge from plastic to metal, and and used the new and improved metal melting station to create all manner of things from liquefied spoons. Screwdrivers and screws, buckets, shovels, metal sheeting, tubes, wires, and all sorts of stuff. Once we had some decent tools and supplies, we quickly built a Molecular-Reatomizing device. It really would make life so much easier. Of course, the first thing we tried to make with the re-atomizer was pizzazium. Of course, we got a lump of Rutherfordium instead. But that wouldn't stop us. If you are stymied by one failure, then you will never reach success.

So we used the re-atomizer to make all the things we needed, that couldn't be made by re-forging spoons and turkey basters. Like actual turkey, which was delicious, if a bit dry.

After a bit of brainstorming on the problems, I came up with a brilliant idea.

"Hey Ferb?"

He looked at me.

"You remember what happened when Candace got hit with that Molecular Splitter?"

Of course he did, how could he not?

"Well, we now know that when the Splitter is used on a person, it splits them apart into two respective people, each of which will embody one of the two strongest feelings in that person right at that moment."

By the look in his eyes, I could tell that Ferb knew where I was going with this.

"Let's rebuild the Molecular Splitter and use it again, but this time, use it on me! Hopefully, one of the two people I'm split into will be my purely inventive and logical side - and hopefully that half of me will be able to solve the puzzle of Pizzazium. That half would be much more efficient at things of the sort, especially since their mind would be entirely logical, with no emotions to crowd out any ideas."

His look said _This is a bad idea_. And it was, to a degree. But, it was so bad, that it just might work.

"Come on", I said,"Let's just try it. I mean, the worst thing that can happen is that my purely inventing side doesn't come up with the right idea. It's not like there's any crazy inside of me."

Ferb stared pointedly.

"Orrrr is there?" I dramatically added, holding out my arms in front of myself and running at him, while doing my best roar. He picked up and orange and threw it at me, the juicy fruit splattering on the ground in front of me. I burst out laughing.

"Come on, bro." I could see in his eyes that he was relenting.

"That's the spirit. Let's get started!"

A Molecular Splitter is not a terribly complicated piece of machinery, so we had fully re-created it in just a matter of minutes. The small, camera-like device was quite impressive, though, capable of splitting, as an example, a single Red Delicious apple into two apples, one red, and one delicious.

After a moment of tuning the settings, I handed it to Ferb.

"Fire away!" I said, staring into the lens. He pulled the trigger, and my entire field of vision was filled with a blinding light.

* * *

One of the consequences of being molecularly split into multiple people is that, when the two recombine, the original will have no memory of anything that went on during the time he (or she) was split apart. It is due to this fact that I have taken over the narration of the immediately following events.

When I pulled the trigger of the splitting device, a bright flash of light temporarily blinded me. I had forgotten that Splitter produced such intense flashes during use. But it was a success, because when the light faded, my brother stood in front of me, split apart into two distinct people. My first goal was to determine which emotion of Phineas' each person represented. This wouldn't be too difficult to figure out. Phineas is a very outgoing person, and a lot like Candace in the regard that he tends to act or say immediately what he feels is appropriate. The immediate result of this would be that the separate copies of him would display their respective emotion fairly obviously.

Drawing near to one of the two, my thoughts were immediately drowned in an outburst of speech coming from one copy of my brother.

"Ferb! Ferb! Isn't everything so great! It's wonderful! Oh, I just love it! How great! You're so awesome, and I'm so happy we are here together! Just think! We can do whatever we want! It's amazing!"

Well, this half was clearly Phineas' happy side. And he had said there was no crazy in him. Smiling inside myself, I left the somewhat over-enthusiastic half, heading over towards the over. I assumed, as had Phineas, that this half would be the logical side, the one with all of his inventing and ideas concentrated into one mind, with nothing else to distract. Instead, I got the surprise of my life.

As I walked up near the second Phineas, I noticed that he was sitting silently on the ground, hugging his knees. When I got close enough, I heard a sound I didn't think was possible from my brother. He was sniffling. By complete instinct, I reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. He may have only been half of Phineas, but he was still Phineas enough that it broke my heart to hear him cry.

He turned to look at me, his usually-bright eyes dark and brimming over with tears.

"Oh, F-Ferb" he stammered out, in a voice so laden with sorrow it took me aback. "Do you th-think that we will ever get home? Do-do you think we will ever get to see Mom, or Dad, or Candace, or-or-or-" his voice trailed off and he burst into tears.

I wasn't aware that such melancholy thoughts had any place at all inside my brothers' mind. He always had such an aura of cheer and self-confidence around him that radiated so brightly, even the darkest of times. To think that such a sad, frightened little boy was still somewhere beneath all the cheery bravado he had shown me during our brief stay outside space and time was rather shocking. Phineas and I were closer to each other than many people who had spent a lifetime together. I was shocked he had such sadness on the inside, and I hadn't detected a single whiff of it, either in speech, or mannerisms, or any way at all.

Although, looking back over Phineas' writing from the previous hours, I still see no sorrow whatsoever. It seems as if he is hiding this not from me, but from himself. It kind of stung, in way. I was his brother, his absolute closest friend in all matters, and yet he had had such strong feelings he didn't share?

Was it because even _he_ didn't know he felt this way? Was his subconscious mind quashing all inner turmoil, in an attempt to keep his conscious outlook on the world happy and out-going? I shook my head. Homesick Phineas had by now stood up, and was crying intently into my shoulder while I was standing still, thinking all these many things.

Carefully extricating myself from the weepy half of my brother, I went over and grabbed Happy Phineas. I couldn't stand to see my brother like this, even though it was only half of him. Plus, neither half of him was going to be particularly good at solving our puzzle, although for entirely opposite reasons.

"Where are we going? Oh, I bet it will be awesome. You're the best brother, you know? Everything is soooo great."

I deposited Happy Phineas next to Sad Phineas and went to retrieve the Molecular Splitter. In another flash of light, the two vastly different halves were gone, replaced by the one whole.

Phineas was back.

"How'd it go?" he asked. I shook my head.

"No logical side, huh." I shook my head again.

"Well, that's one idea down. Guess we have to try something else. Thanks for trying. On to the next one!"

He shot me a silly grin. Phineas was back to his old self again, and seemed once more to be supremely at peace with the fact that we are outside of existence. But the feelings of pity so recently stirred up inside me were still there, as I now knew that somewhere, underneath all of the happiness and energy he exuded, there was still at least a small part of Phineas that desperately missed his family, and wanted to be home. The tear-stains still on my shoulder were a rapidly-disappearing testament to that.


	4. Construction Compulsion

At precisely 3:32 AM, hours before the infant Saturday morning had even begun to see the first inklings of daylight, Candace exhausted all of her writing supplies. Tip-toeing around the house, she scoured it from top to bottom for more paper, but returned at last to her room empty-handed.

She wasn't even close to being done - no, the Theory of Everything was still boiling unwritten in her head. In her haste to transcribe the sudden fount of knowledge she had burst open, she had neglected to realize a simple fact. The Theory of Everything encompasses all manner of things, as the name implies. This also includes infinity. There were many mathematical calculations within it that explained all the many facets of the unending. But, like everything else involving infinity, the equations were also infinite - infinitely complex, infinitely layered, and infinitely long. They had to be, for one cannot contain infinite knowledge without being infinitely large. She hadn't thought of this, or even of anything at all. When the explosion of knowledge had burst forth in her mind, there had only been one thought present: _Do something with it_. The willpower to know such vast information and yet bottle it up, and refuse to use it was as yet beyond her grasp. The things she had so suddenly realized and grasped were bubbling inside of her like a geyser, filling her brain and driving her to do something, anything, to get it out.

But there was nothing else to do - not at this insanely early morning hour. Candace picked up all the piles of notebooks and papers scattered about her room and began stacking them neatly in corner. But, then, as she ceased putting her newfound knowledge into use, strange things began happening.

As she moved the papers, a gazillion new ideas poured into her mind. A teleportation system that automatically transported things into pile would be really cool. How about a giant magnet that attracted papers? Or a scanner capable of reading the contents of papers and organizing them. Or... she paused. She hadn't neatly piled the papers at all! Instead, a scale replica on the Eiffel Tower, made entirely of folded paper, towered up to her ceiling; dwarfing her furniture. A sudden, sharp pain sliced through her head.

Dropping the notebook in her hand, she grabbed a pillow off her bed, and held it tightly over her mouth.

"Mmmmmmphhhhhhh!" the muffled scream forced its way through the thick padding. All these ideas for things, both mundane and extraordinary, forced their way into her head. And they _wouldn't_ go away. Robots - engines - reactors - teleportation - space travel - shrinking devices - computers. The pressure inside her brain was immense, so much so that she could almost feel the steam pouring out her ears. Plopping down on her bed, she hugged her knees to her chest, as an intense ache began developing in her head. Letting out a weak whimper, she rocked back and forth, and began talking frantically to herself.

"I could make so many, _many_ things. A roller coaster to the moon! A beam that eliminates the need for sleep. The most efficient sorting system known to man. A tunnel through the core of earth. A city-wide bio-dome. A ... a... a..." she stuttered. Springing up, she laid ahold of the rusty toolbox she had brought in from the garage. She had to make something. Anything. Anything to make it  _go away_. Wielding the tools with a dexterity she hadn't known that she possessed, she disassembled her bed and then put it back to together. Then again. And again. It helped, a little bit. As she put her her bed frame back together for the forty-fourth time, she collapsed on the mattress, exhausted from the exertion. Her body was crying out for rest, but her brain wouldn't shut off.

She understood now. She understood why her brothers had done what they did. Did they feel the same way? Did they feel physical pain, a wild, unquenchable thirst for mechanical engineering, an unstoppable urging to create something, anything, that thumped into their brains like the pounding of a drum when it went unfulfilled? She'd never seen anything either of their personalities that would have suggested it. She'd never realized that such a gift, such talent, wasn't free. That there was price to pay to for possessing such ability. It was like a ravaging beast in your brain. If you didn't feed it, it would make you miserable. She wouldn't wish this feeling upon her worst enemy. Deep-cutting guilt smarted through her. When she had tried so hard to bust her brothers, to prevent from doing what they did, had they suffered this way? Had she inadvertently caused such tremendous suffering in the two of them?

She glanced down at her hands. Without her conscious knowledge, they had picked apart a notebook and used the papers inside to create an origami plane. Becoming more frightened at herself by the moment, she reflexively threw the plane across the room, and was only slightly surprised when it's paper turbines began spinning, and miniature landing gear extended from it's bottom, enabling the plane to right itself in mid-air and come to a smooth landing at the base of the Eiffel Tower.

An involuntary shiver ran up and down her spine. She had to find something to do. Something. Something large. It had to be big enough pacify the new hunger awakened inside of her. It had to be huge. Enormous. Unfathomably monstrous.

With a squeak, she scooped up the rusty tools on her floor. Kicking her bedroom door open, she ran downstairs and through the sliding glass door into the backyard. In movements so fast the eye could hardly follow, she seized a shovel and excavated a six-foot-wide hole all the way down to bedrock. The dirt mound piled up next to the brink of the hole towered almost sixty feet into the air. Moving so quickly that only a blur could be seen, she sculpted and carved and shaped the heap of topsoil. Fifteen minutes later, she was done. Face as red as her shirt, and gasping for breath from the insane exertion, she stood shakily before her crazed creation. It was a full-scale apartment building, with working elevators, towering five stories into the morning sky. Made _entirely_ of dirt.

As the adrenaline rush slowly drained from her system, her headache ceased. The monster had been satisfied, at least for now. Suddenly, a thick tiredness descended on her like a fog. She turned slowly, and began the trek back into her house. It felt like she was barely moving. Each step seemed like a mile and she staggered heavily with each one taken. The sliding glass door of the house, still hanging open, appeared to be miles and miles away. Candace slowly forced herself take step after step. Stumbling tipsily through the door, she collapsed on the nearby couch.

"I should get back into my bed" she thought dully. But she didn't move. A moment later, and she was fast asleep, more peacefully than she had ever had in the brief handful of days after her brothers' disappearance. The sliding glass door hung open, the sounds of the crickets mixing with the whirring of the air conditioner. The blue moonlight cast its cold glow on the new building in the backyard, glinting off the brown walls and through the glassless window frames. Inside, the solid-dirt elevator continued its automated course from floor to floor, and back again.

* * *

Linda Flynn Fletcher lie silently in bed, eyes on the television, but thoughts far away.

"It's a beautiful Saturday morning here in the Tri-State Area. The weather today will be reaching highs of..."

"Honey" she said, without moving "Do you think something is wrong with Candace? You think she's sick or something?"

"Don't worry about it" Lawrence replied from beside her. "She's a teenager, you know. All kinds of crazy things are always going in the little world that teenagers live in."

"But her room was such a catastrophe last night. And she didn't eat dinner at all! That's so unlike her."

"If it was something truly serious I believe she'd tell us. It's more likely that it was the other type of thing. You know, 'Oh no, one of my friends didn't text me back fast enough last night! I'm going to _die_!' And besides, cut the girl some slack. She did have to spend the night before last in the hospital."

Linda chuckled. "You know," she said, smiling, "Once, when I was a girl, one time..."

"Is this that story about the movie theater? I've forgotten how it ended. Perhaps hearing it for the thirty-thousandth time would help."

"Oh shush, you!" she playfully punched her husband in the side.

Then, the TV caught her eye.

"In more local news, today while flying over the local neighborhood of Arbor Estates, our Channel Six news chopper caught a view of this" - and the screen flashed a shaky video feed of a towering brown building, abruptly jutting out of an otherwise normal-looking neighborhood.

"Arbor- that's where we live. How did we not notice one of our neighbors putting up a skyscraper in their backyard?" Linda asked.

"I don't know. One thing's for sure, though. Whoever it is, is going to get quite the sternly-worded letter from the HOA."

"Ha! Can you imagine it?" Putting on a exaggeratedly deep voice, she continued. "Sir or Madam, we'll kindly have to ask you to stop building skyscrapers on your yard. It conflicts with something, of course, as does everything we don't like. While we're at it, why don't you just give us your house?"

Lawrence stretched and slowly pushed aside the covers. "Come on, lets get downstairs. I'll make the breakfast today. I'm sure that Candace is starving after passing up dinner last night."

Linda reached for the remote and switched off the television set. "Alright, I'll be down right after you."

He pulled on his robe and left the bedroom. Peeking into Candace's room, he was taken aback by the sudden appearance of a huge Eiffel Tower that was now in her room. And also the noticeable lack of Candace herself, although the tower captured his attention more easily.

"How did that get here?" he said to himself. Drawn by curiosity, he walked into the empty room and examined it more closely. It was made from folded papers, all of which were covered in unintelligible scribbles.

"That is impressive. I wonder if Candace built this? No wonder she missed dinner, if she was making this." he hummed quietly to himself. Turning to leave the room and continue downstairs, something crunched under his slipper. Moving his foot, he realized he had squashed what appeared to be a little paper plane. Leaning down to pick it up, something out the room's lone backyard-facing window caught his eye. Walking to the window and laying his hands on the sill, his eyes grew as wide as saucers. There, in the backyard, was the same brown skyscraper that had been on the news. Okay, it wasn't really a skyscraper. It was closer to five stories tall, but still, _how in the world_ had it gotten in _their_ backyard _overnight_?

There was a huge hole next to the building, as if all materials used in its creation had been freshly excavated. The walls and door of the building were uniformly dirt-colored - almost looking as if they were indeed made of dirt.

"What are you looking at?" Linda asked, from the doorway of the room. Completely mute in surprise, he merely motioned for her to come over and look out the window herself.

"Can you see the sky...Ohhhhhh myyyyyyy..." her voice trailed off as she saw the building.

Towering over puny two-story home, it rose into the sky. The doors hung open, as inviting some unknown person to come inside. Dirt-covered tools were lying scattered about the ground around the base of the building.

Blinking rapidly several times, Linda was the first to snap out of the shock.

"Wh - Where is Candace?" she said at last. The sound of her voice helped jar her husband back from the oblivion.

"I-I don't know."

"Come on. We'd better go find her. And find out _what in goodness' name_ is going on here."

Nodding, Lawrence tore his eyes from the window. When the two of them went downstairs into the living room, another ridiculous scene presented itself.

The sliding glass door into the backyard was hanging open, sucking air conditioning out into the warm early fall atmosphere. No wonder the unit seemed to have been running all night long. Candace was sprawled out on the couch, snoring heavily, drool slowly pouring out of her mouth and collecting in a puddle on the floor. She was covered in dirt from head to toe, caked so heavily that her orange hair almost appeared brown. Even in sleep, however, she wasn't still. Her left hand was dangling on the ground, fingers twitching rapidly as they pulled strings out of the carpet. The carpet in the spot her hand was lying had become entirely threadbare, and the tangled heap of string nearby was testament to the fact that, although done in sleep, it had by no means been ineffective.

The two adults glanced at each other, eyes communicating perfectly well the confusion they were both feeling.

Stepping forwards, Lawrence slid the glass door shut. He opened his mouth to speak, but the doorbell rang at just that moment, cutting him off before he began.

"I'll go get that", he said, striding out towards the front door, leaving his wife alone in the living room.

Linda leaned over and gingerly shook Candace awake, not wanting to fully lay her hands on the girl when she was so heavily coated in dirt and gunk.

"Hmm rrr rmm..." Candace's eyes slowly opened. She stretched and yawned loudly, wiping away the traces of drool from her face. Slowly and awkwardly pulling herself up into a sitting position, she took one look at her mother's face and realized something was quite out of the ordinary.

"What's going on?" she asked. Then she looked down at herself and realized - with the memories of the night before suddenly coming crashing back. "Oh. Yeah, uh, I'm - sorry - I'm so dirty. I was..."

"Did you know about that?" her mother interrupted her, gesturing through the door at the building. Candace resisted rolling her eyes.

"Of course", she muttered under her breath,"the Mysterious Force naturally wouldn't do anything when _I_ build ..."

"Are you saying _you_ built that? Last night?" her mother interrupted again.

"What?" Candace started. "What?! No! Of course not! How could I? I'm a teenager - how could I build a five story apartment building with working elevators in one night, out of dirt? That's ... crazy. Totally."

"What's this about working elevators?" Linda asked, raising an eyebrow. "How would you know if it had elevators or not?"

"What?! I wouldn't! I was just ... guessing. Like, _if_ it did have elevators, wow. That would be so crazy. Right?"

"Candace, I worry about you sometimes. What happened to you last night, anyway?"

"Uhh..." Candace reached up and a strange itch that had developed on the back of her head. Before she was forced to continue, however; her father returned, face grim, bearing an official-looking in his hands. Even from across the room, it was easy to read the large bold letters marked on it: **CEASE AND DESIST**.

"Well, what are we going to do?" he asked, handing it to Linda, who pulled out the letter from the inside and began reading it. A long moment of silence passed between the three of them, as her eyes traced the lines on the paper. Candace took this opportunity to stand up, wincing at the sheer of amount of dirt that she left behind on the couch, and get a better look out the door at her creation. It was truly breathtaking. For a building made entirely of dirt, it _was_ quite impressive. It was also impressive for a building constructed entirely by a single teenager in the space of fifteen minutes.

"They want us to take it down in a week?!" her mother suddenly exclaimed, stuffing the letter back in the envelope and handing it back to Lawrence. "How are we supposed to take down a five-story building in the space of week? And does no-one care that it literally came from nowhere overnight? Shouldn't that be what they are truly going after?"

Lawrence shrugged his shoulders. "What can I say?" he said, "Tell them we were the victims of a criminal who buildings buildings in people's backyards without their permission? That we planted magic skyscraper beans in our garden? They're just assuming that we somehow built it right under their noses, and that they've not noticed it until now."

Linda heaved a huge sigh. "I know. I know. But how can we get rid of it in the space of a _week_?"

The itch on the back of her head resurfaced. Against her better judgement, Candace turned and spoke.

"Water." she said, "Water will get rid of it."

Her parents looked at her, various stages of cluelessness on their faces. She would have explain.

"It's made solidly of dirt, right? I mean," , and she paused to clear her throat, "it _looks_ like its made of dirt. So, water will turn it to mud, which doesn't have the structural integrity to remain standing. It'll collapse - probably into the world's biggest mud puddle. So, we just have to spray it with the hose. Or wait for it to rain. Or _make_ it r-" she cut herself off before she could finish that thought. Where had it come from, anyway?

"You think it's really made of _dirt_? How could it stand?"

"Well, the structural integrity of dry, compacted soil is act- I don't know! It was just a guess. Totally. heheheheh-" She clamped her own mouth shut in an attempt to stifle the crazed sounds that boiled out without her consent.

Her parents shared a concerned look, and Candace felt herself growing aggravated with them.

"Come on! What's the worst that could happen? If I'm wrong, then we get the side of the building wet and lose like five minutes."

Lawrence sighed. "Alright, Candace. If you really think that'll work, I'll get the hose and spray it for a couple of minutes. I mean, it  _does_ look like it's made of dirt, I suppose. But I want you to go up and take a shower right now. And when you come back down, you still need to explain just how you got so dirty anyway."

Candace nodded silently.

"Alright" he said, "I'll be right back. Go!" And he motioned up the stairs, obviously indicating the upstairs bathroom.

As she walked upstairs, she heard her father slide open the door and go outside. As she grabbed a fresh set of clothes from her closet and headed to the bathroom, she heard the sound of the water hose from her bedroom window, and her father's shocked gasp when the walls of the building no doubt started melting beneath the spray. While showering, working hard to scrub away layer after layer of impossibly caked dirt on herself, she suddenly heard an incredibly loud _SQUELCH_! as her construction no doubt collapsed in on itself. Oh. She'd neglected to think about the fact that such an implosion would no doubt fling absolute tons of mud everywhere. Well, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

But it _was_ so bad. She gave herself a superficial visual once-over, declared her shower 'good enough'; then hastily dried off, dressed, and headed downstairs. Once in the living room, she realized that the sliding glass doors were no longer transparent - not in the slightest. Solid brown coated every inch of them, obscuring any view of the outdoors. Driven by curiosity, she stepped over and pulled the door open.

The entire backyard had been converted into a muddy wasteland. The mud was everywhere - coating the back of the house in a thick layer of goop. Her father was now standing ankle-deep in slime and was coated completely by the thick gunk.

"Candace!" he called, when he heard the door open. "Go get your mother. And bring towels. A lot of them. Like, all of them."

Okay. She could do that. Pulling the disgusting door shut, she went to find Linda.

"Mooooooom!" Something in her memory snapped painfully at the tone of voice she automatically assumed.

"Don't you worry." she whispered under her breath. "I'll get you guys back, just you wait. It won't take long now. I promise"

Raising her voice again, she shouted again. "Moooooom!"

"What is it? There's no need to shout!" Linda said, coming up the staircase out of the basement.

"Dad's gotten rid of the building, but there's mud everywhere, and he wanted me to get you and bring a crap ton of towels."

"What? You mean the building actually fell apart when he went out to wet it?"

For a moment, Candace paused. "Did you not hear that massive squishing noise?" she asked hesitantly.

"No, honey, I heard nothing. You know how the basement is - you can't hear anything down there."

"Well, come on, anyway. You'll see." Candace grabbed ahold of her mother's hand and pulled her into the living room, giving her the prime position to see ... the backyard? Wait, what?

Candace dropped her grasp on Linda's hand and ran over to the sliding glass door, pulling it open. In stark contrast to the state it was in just moments before, the door, and the yard, and the house were all squeaky clean, without any hint at the massive mudslide that been present in the very recent past. And the giant hole in the yard? The one all the way to bedrock? It was gone as well. The entire yard was once more perfectly level and clean.

"But...but...but...but..." Candace stammered, then slammed the sliding door shut with disgust. The Mysterious Force really would spare no effort to make her look stupid, would it? Even now, when there wasn't even anyone to bust for the mud puddle - all she had to do was _talk_ about something crazy to her mom, and then attempt to show her, and -boom!- it would be gone.

Her father appeared behind them in the living room, suddenly, also lacking any sign of the thick gloopy layer of slime that she had just seen all over him.

"Stiff upper lip and all that." he said. Candace frowned.

Her mother turned to face him and said, "Well what do you know? I suppose that worked after all. Great idea, Candace. I've got to get going to the Squat n' Stitch now, or I'll be late. I'll miss breakfast, but that can't be helped, can it? See you guys in a bit."

"Lovely windmill, isn't it?" her father said, then as what seemed to be a sort of afterthought, flailed his arm in the general direction of a picture of a windmill hanging on the wall.

"I suppose it is. Well, I've to go. I'm already gonna be a few minutes late. I don't know why we scheduled it so early this morning." She rushed out of the room in a hurry.

"So..." Candace said awkwardly, staring at the floor, "You want to know how I got so dirty, huh?" She swallowed nervously. This was not gonna be fun to explain. But her dad caught her completely off-guard.

"As long as it's okay with Mum, it's okay with me."

"What?" She looked up, somewhat confused at his statement. "But... it _wasn't_ okay with her, at least not that I saw?" Maybe she shouldn't be questioning this strange turn of events.

"Jolly good, Candace."

"Okay, then..." she replied hesitantly. "I'm just gonna go out to the backyard and try to make - I mean, do _nothing_. Nothing at all!"

"As long as it's okay with Mum, it's okay with me."

"Aaaaalrighty then. See you around."

"Jolly good, Candace."

Candace turned and walked up to her room. The strange conversation with her father had not helped the state of her nerves. Why was he acting so strange? Maybe the consequences of her brothers' disappearance was starting to have more serious effects on the space-time continuum. That wasn't good - it meant she'd have to figure out some way to save them, even faster than she was already trying to do so.

Once in her room, she sat down on her bed and scratched the back of her head. That itch was back, and it was worse this time before.

"Okay, think." she told herself. "I can't build a space-time ripper just out of dirt. I'll need a bunch of stuff, like, tesla coils, and nuclear reactors, and negative mass generators. Where am I going to get the supplies for all that stuff?"

She pulled out her phone and opened up the web browser. " _where to get supplies for nuclear fusion_ ". The web results were pretty disappointing. This was becoming a pretty repeatable pattern. Perhaps the internet wasn't as useful people often claimed. Fusion reactors were expensive, and hard to make of any significant size. But, there was nonetheless one commercial outlet where one could purchase them. The Super Duper Mega Superstore, which was often touted as being the ' _ultimate supplier of everything in the Tri-State Area_ '. Mixed in with more normal shopping merchandise, such as clothing and food, the Superstore also sold nuclear fissile material, Pizzazium Infinionite, and other highly unstable and radioactive substances. Did people other than Phineas and Ferb actually buy nuclear power rods from that place? How many people actually needed stuff like that?

Dialing the number on their website, Candace held the phone to ear and listened to the phone ring. After a moment, someone picked up.

"You've reached the Superduper Mega Superstore Customer Assistance Line. My name is Brandon. How can I help you today?"

"Uh, yeah." she said, "Say I want to buy some ... uranium-235, for - something. Can I just, like, walk in and do that?"

"Purchases of highly radioactive material are regulated under federal law, requiring a municipal permit issued by local governing bodies. If you give me your Reactor Operator Class A or B license number now, I can authorize it over the phone. If you have a Class C license or have a Reactor Technician license, you'll have to bring it down to the store."

Another roadblock. Candace sighed. Every time she thought she was getting close to her goal, something new popped up and proved otherwise.

"Alright, can you quickly tell me how to get one of those?"

"They are given out by the City Council, after an interview, and after they have approved any speculative blueprints. Zoning licenses required additionally for any project must be gotten separately. Mayoral approval is usually required to finalize the documentation, though not necessarily always."

"Okay. Let me call you back." With a click, she hung up the call. So, the new steps she had to go through involved getting an interview with the City Council and getting them _and_ the mayor to approve her project. This was probably going to be an inane amount of trouble. Why did everything have to be _so_ hard? Sighing again, she quickly looked up the phone number for City Hall.

"You've reached the office of Mayor Doofenshmirtz. I'm Melanie Dobson, how can I help you?"

Wait, what? Suddenly, the puzzle pieces clicked together in Candace's brain, and she felt as if a light bulb had gone off.

" _Doofenshmirtz_? The mayor is Roger Doofenshmirtz! Of course! How could I not remember that?"

"Hmm. Yes, that is indeed his name. Do you need anything else?"

"Yes yes yes!" Her thoughts of nuclear licenses had completely drained away. "Do you know if the mayor has a brother?"

"A brother? Yes, he has a brother, -"

" _Heinz_ Doofenshmirtz?"

"That is the one."

"Do you know where his brother lives?"

"I'm afraid I don't. I can make you an appointment to come see the mayor, if you want ask him, though."

"You can? For when?"

"Hmm. Give me a moment to look at his schedule."

Candace heard humming and the rustling of paper coming over the speaker. That itch in her head was back again. Ugh. Reaching back to scratch it, she heard a noise coming from the door in her room. Turning to see the source, she saw her father standing still, intently watching her. What in the world?

"Uh, Dad? What are you doing?"

"Jolly good, Candace." he said, then quickly turned and walked down the hall. Her thoughts questioning the strange behavior were quickly filed away for another time when she heard the secretary's voice come back over the phone.

"You're in luck today. Mayor Doofenshmirtz's schedule is mostly empty, in fact, he wasn't even supposed to come in today at all. I can make you a ten-minute appointment at 12:30 PM. Does that sound alright?"

Candace glanced at the alarm clock on her nightstand. It was 10:58 AM. The bus trip to city hall would be about forty minutes. Yeah, that was plenty of time.

"That's great." she said, "I'll be there."

"Alright, can I have your name?"

"Candace Flynn. Spelled  C-A-N-D-A-C-E F-L-Y-N-N."

"Alright, Ms. Flynn, I'll see you today at 12:30. Have a nice day."

"You too", she said as she hung up. Springing up off the bed, she couldn't resist letting out a small whoop of joy. This was it! It was almost _too_ perfect. What were the chances that the mayor's brother happened to be the very same scientist that she needed? All she had to do was track him down and convince him of her reasons to re-build (or least let her re-build) his device. If he hadn't built it, then she could at least get him to tell her where he had gotten it from. Everything was at last falling into place.

" _Not much longer now_ " she mentally told Phineas and Ferb. " _Not much longer at all. Just hang on a bit for me, alright?_ " It had been three long days since their disappearance. Surely they, of all people, would be able to cling to life for three days in the void? She had to get to them fast, and snatch them from whatever horrid state they were now trapped in.

Candace's head itched again, and she reached back and scratched it. Each time it re-surfaced the intensity grew worse, and she had a feeling that it wasn't entirely unrelated to the burst of psychosis that had driven her erect that building last night. Grabbing her bus pass, wallet, and the Martian's little box off her nightstand, she dumped them into her pockets and set out for the bus stop.

"Daaad!" she called, as she left the house, "I'm gonna go ... shopping? Shopping! Is that okay? I'll be back soon, promise."

"Jolly good, Candace." was heard from her parent's room. She frowned. Her brother's disappearance had to be the reason behind all of these 'jolly goods' and his other strange behavior. Letting the front door swing shut behind her, she set off for the bus stop.

As she made the short walk, her phone rang in her pocket. Fishing it out, she glanced at the Caller ID and hesitated. It was Jeremy. While a small part of her wanted to immediately answer the phone, the majority of her brain was warning her off. Her relationship with her parents had fairly quickly degraded over the past few days, until she internally regarded them almost more as acquaintances that parents. It was just impossible to maintain a close bond with people who didn't remember her brothers - they wouldn't understand her reasons for acting as she did, and would come to view her as weird, or, less politely, completely insane. In the end, however, her romantic side, as shrunken as it had become over the past few days, finally beat out the purely logical side that had ruled her mind since her breakdown in the hospital bed.

"After all", she reasoned in her mind, "as long as I don't bring up anything to do with my brothers, then Jeremy won't know any different. There's no reason he would bring them up. I can just pretend that he remembers them too. It'll be just like before." She could easily see through the lie she told herself, but nonetheless flipped open the phone.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Candace, how are you?"

Having made it to the bus stop, she sat down on the bench to wait on the bus. Might as well have someone to talk to. If she steered the conversation away from any potential dangerous subjects, then it should be fine.

"I'm good" she lied, "you?"

"I'm alright. You wanna go somewhere and do something? We can go to the park?"

Uh oh. She let out a long breath. This was going to be tricky to explain.

"Uh, I'm really, really, really, sorry, but I can't today. I'm busy with, uh, stuff!"

"Oh, that sucks. Mind if I ask what stuff?"

" _Yeah, I kinda do!_ " Candace said to herself.

" No, not at all", she said aloud, "It's just ordinary stuff, uh, I'm going shopping." That seemed to have become her go-to excuse recently. _I'm shopping_. _I'm going to shop_. _I was shopping_. Man, if she didn't love shopping so much, there'd have been no way she could have covered up her strange behavior and frequent disappearances of the past few days.

"Any reason I can't come with you?"

"Uh, uh, it's because, uh, it's a girl's day out! Yeah! Uh, Stacy and I are going shopping today. Just the two of us. Sorry."

"Alright then. Call me when you get done, maybe there'll still be time for us to do something." She could hear the disappointment in his voice, and felt a small pinprick of guilt, but ignored it and went on. After all, he wouldn't ever find out, and if he did, she would be able to easily explain once she had her brothers back.

"I'll be sure to do that." she said, standing up. The bus had arrived.

"Say hi to Stacy for me."

"Alright, I will." More lies. Would they ever end? "Bye."

"Goodbye."

And the phone call was over. Dropping the phone back into its place in her pocket, she quickly pulled out her bus pass, and boarded the bus to City Hall. City Hall - were the answer to her problems lied in the most surprising of sources. The _mayor_. As she sat on the hard seat of the bus, rocking back and forth to the motion of the wheels, she found her thoughts wandering to alternative modes of transportation. Wouldn't it just be the coolest if she built a super-speed moving sidewalk through the sky that..." _No!_ " she mentally cut off her own train of thought. She had to get this thing under control. What she had done last night had almost had disastrous consequences, and if her father hadn't suddenly started acting so strange and out of touch, probably would have.

"Ironic" she thought to herself. "Most people go mad and break stuff. Me? No. My life can never be normal, even when I'm losing my mind. So when I go crazy, I build stuff." She smirked despite herself.

"Well" she decided, "I guess the benefit is that if I ever go entirely off the deep end, instead of becoming a major threat to society, I'll become their greatest blessing. Woo, what a dignified ending."

It was a small comfort. She had to find her brothers before long now, and for her own sake as well as theirs. If anyone could help her deal with this strange sort of construction compulsion, it would be Phineas and Ferb. The worst part of all this, was that she now _knew_ how to get them back, knew what to do, but couldn't, all due to the fact that she didn't have a ton of money to throw around. Of course, she could do as her brothers had done, and make things, and sell them, starting small(-ish) and slowly increasing until she had an astronomically large budget. But that would take time, and time she just didn't have. Already, the disappearance of her brothers was having a negative influence on her father. And now Candace had finally cracked the scientific knowledge needed to create the necessary gadgets, only to discover that with that knowledge came a willpower-shattering drive to madly create things, that, if it went unfulfilled, wouldn't hesitate to force you into a mental breakdown. Of course, there was also the fact that if she didn't hurry, her brothers would probably starve to death. Or dehydrate. What was there to eat or drink outside the space-time continuum? Hopefully something enough to keep them alive just a bit longer. Just a bit longer. That was all she needed.

With a shrill wail, the brakes on the bus alerted its passengers that the destination had been reached. City Hall. She stood up and hurriedly forced her way through the other passengers. Sprinting away from the bus stop and up the white marble staircase, she ran through the propped-open double doors of City Hall. Stopping just before she entered the waiting room with the secretary, she smoothed her clothes and took just a moment to steady her breathing. Slightly more composed, she walked up to the desk.

"Hi," she said, "I'm Candace Flynn. I made an appointment earlier this morning?"

The secretary eyed her.

"Aren't you a little young to be making an appointment with the mayor for the purposes of interviewing him about his family?"

"Yes, yes I am."

"Hmm, well, I suppose there's no reason why you can't. Alright, take a seat. I'll let you know when the mayor will see you."

"Thanks."

Candace turned and sank into one of the chairs in the small waiting room. Pulling out her phone, she glanced at the time. 11:55 AM. She was almost a half-hour early. Would she really have to wait for half an hour? The itch on the back her head came back. When she reached up to scratch it, it wasn't so quick to dissipate as in the past. She had a feeling she knew why. It had been almost nine hours since she had built that dirt building, and the pressure to create something was slowly rebuilding in the back of her mind. But it hadn't reached boiling point yet. Yet. Mentally forcing a lid on the gathering steam, she took a deep breath and attempted to empty her mind of engineering and construction related ideas. She had to be at least halfway coherent when she spoke to the mayor, even if she just intended to ask him where his brother was. Now, as she was sitting here in the waiting room, she began having second thoughts about this idea. Did people tell their siblings where they went they moved? She tried to imagine herself, all grown up. If she moved out, and went somewhere far away, would she tell Phineas and Ferb? Of course she would, even if it really didn't matter. There wasn't anywhere in the known or unknown universe that she could go where Phineas and Ferb wouldn't be able to find her if they wanted to.

She could just imagine herself fleeing to some distant exotic planet quadrillions of light years away, perhaps at the other end of the universe, yet having Phineas and Ferb still drop in every other day when they went to the store for stuff. It seemed like _such_ a thing they would do. She smiled, in spite of herself and the situation she was in. A quiet whirring shattered her thoughts. Glancing down, she saw that she had unknowingly pulled apart a hotel brochure lying nearby and reassembled the paper into a miniature helicopter, the blades of which were rotating rapidly, slowly lifting the paper aircraft up out of her palms. With a sudden decisive motion, she clapped her hands together, crushing the helicopter into a paper ball, and tossed the ball onto the floor.

The secretary glanced up from her desk at the sound of the paper ball hitting the floor. She looked around the room, but, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, turned back to her computer screen.

Staring at the clock on the wall, Candace watched the minute hand slowly move around its face. Almost there. Just a bit longer. Surely it was 12:30 now. Okay, maybe it was 12:20. Who cared about ten minutes, right? She shifted her gaze onto the second hand, its more easily visible movement soothing. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Come on. Just a little bit more. She leaned forwards in her chair. Just a liiiiittle bit more. At very very long last, the secretary stood up and cleared her throat.

"Ms Flynn?" she asked, posing it as a question even though Candace was the only other person in the room.

"Yes!" she responded instantly, shooting up out of her seat.

"The mayor will see you now. You have ten minutes." She motioned towards the dark-colored wooden door in the corner, with it's brass colored nameplate reading: _The Honorable Roger Doofenshmirtz, Mayor of Danville_.

Candace pushed open the door and stepped into the mayor's office.

"Ah, Ms. ... Flynn" said Mayor Doofenshmirtz, glancing at a paper on his desk. "Come in, come in." He motioned to a chair in front of desk. She took it.

"So," he continued, leaning back slightly in his chair, "How can I help you? I was told you wanted to know about my family?" He paused. "I must say, though, that I assumed you would be older."

"I get that a lot" she replied hastily, brushing aside the pleasantries he offered. "You do have a brother, right?"

"I do." he said. Though it was a statement, there was still a slight questioning undertone in the short answer.

"And your brother is Heinz Doofenshmirtz, you know, the father of Vanessa Doofenshmirtz?"

"Most certainly. Are you here about my niece?"

"Actually, I wanted to know about your brother. You know he moved, right?"

The mayor's eyes were unreadable, as a flash of something darted quickly across his facial features. "I am aware of that." he said a moment later, though the friendliness in his voice was somewhat more plastic-sounding than before. Oblivious to the subtle change in his speech, she pressed on.

"What I want to ask you then, and I promise it's not for anything creepy, is this: Do you know where your brother moved to?"

A silent moment hung in the office.

"No." the mayor answered at last. "He didn't let me know where he moved to, if that's what you're asking."

Darn. Candace hung her head in defeat. Now she was back to ground zero: trying to figure out a way to quickly gather up an immense amount of money to finance the space-time ripper she needed. Why did Heinz Doofenshmirtz have to be so hard to find?

"But" Mayor Doofenshmirtz spoke again, and his voice made her perk up. But what?

"But, I do have these...business cards he gave me a long while ago. I'm not sure what sort of organization its for, but there's an address on it. You can have one if you want one." He reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled one from it, holding it out to her.

She eagerly reached for the card. Studying the small bit of paperboard, she paused for a moment, trying to make sense of the strange acronym embossed on it. But it didn't matter. Underneath the acronym, there was an address. _150 Walker Street_. Whatever was there, surely _they_ would be able to help her track down the elusive scientist. Thanking the mayor for his time, she left the office, and walked out of the municipal building, traveling in the general direction of the bus stop, still puzzling over the odd acronym.

"Hmm" she said to herself at last." Maybe it's Large Orange Vascular Eagles Meeting Under Foxholes For Interesting Nesting." Possible large, orange, and vascular eagles aside, _surely_ the people here knew about Doofenshmirtz. Surely. And maybe she'd get to see just what in the heck a 'vascular eagle' was supposed to be.


	5. Construction Compulsion Redux - The Way of the Platypus

" _Mmmmmmphhh_!"

The sound of a stifled shout pierced the early morning air in the otherwise quiet household. Though most of the intensity was lost in whatever padding had absorbed it, the remnants remaining were still enough to rouse a sleeping Perry the Platypus. His highly-trained senses immediately told him that something was up. Springing out of his bed in the guest room, he whipped out his fedora and planted it on firmly on his head. Since Doofenshmirtz had given up evil several days ago, his life had become increasingly tame as he waited for the Agency to find a new villain sufficiently devious as to warrant their top agent's attention. Even though it was probably nothing, he still jumped at the chance to act as if it was.

Perry stealthily walked out of the guest room and into the hallway, stopping briefly at the door to master bedroom. Hearing only snores, he crept away until he reached into Candace's bedroom. Pressing his head against her door, he heard soft whimpering and quiet frantic speech. What was going on? Dropping into pet mode, he ever so gently pushed the door open, not all the way, but just wide enough so that he could squeeze into the room. The scene he saw in the brightly-painted room was shocking even to him, which was saying something, considering all of the outlandish things he had dealt with over his life.

Candace was sitting on her bed, hugging herself tightly, rapidly blubbering gibberish under her breath. Careful not to take so much as a breath, Perry's trained eyes swept the room, hunting for anything else out of the ordinary. He had seen the room when Candace had spent so many hours furiously writing nonsense chicken scratch onto swaths of paper. He had watched her bring a whiteboard, and the box full of rusty tools into her room. He had wondered what was going on with her, but had chalked it up to nothing more than a little over-exaggerated drama, which, in general, wasn't a terrible guess when it came to Candace Flynn.

Behind her bed, towering up to the ceiling, a replica of the Eiffel Tower stood; moonlight glinting off the whitish-colored girders used in its construction. Perry squinted at it. Was it made of paper? He hadn't seen that before. Where had it come from? Suddenly, Candace leapt up off her bed. For a brief moment, Perry feared he had been spotted. Freezing into place, he stood rigid as a statue, but she grabbed up the old toolbox lying not five feet from him instead. Relaxing slightly when she turned her back to him, he watched in amazement as in a single fluid motion, she picked up her bed's mattress, sliding it off the frame and onto the floor. Working with a mechanical dexterity that vaguely reminded him of a certain no longer evil scientist, she wielded the rusty tools and unscrewed, unfastened, and unlatched the wooden beams of her bed frame. The pieces of wood collapsed uselessly to the ground. The frame was no more.

Then she put it back together. And took it apart again. And then put it back together. And repeated it again, and again, and again. Perry discreetly checked his watch, timing how long it took her to complete each loop. Thirty-three seconds. That was it. It only took her _thirty-three seconds_ to completely disassemble and reassemble and entire twin-size bed frame. That was a crazy level of mechanical proficiency, far outshining even Doofenshmirtz. Had she always been able to this? Perry's thoughts briefly flashed back to the fiasco a few months ago with the alternate dimension, where Candace had discovered his secret identity, as the two of them had fought against the clock to save both themselves, and the populations of not one, but two Tri-State Areas. In the ultimate climatic showdown with the second-dimension incarnation of Doofenshmirtz, Candace had somehow done ... something ... to stop him. For some reason, his usually sharp memory fuzzed over, causing him to draw a blank as to the exact details of what had exactly gone on during that wild time. He could remember enough, however. He knew well enough, that even then, in what would probably end up being the single most dangerous and important time in the girl's life, she hadn't displayed any form of extraordinary ability to create things. Perry frowned. Just why couldn't he exactly remember what had occurred? He'd have to pull out the file and re-read it, as a refresher. He feared that this lapse in recollection was coming from his newly-relaxed life on this extended vacation from the Agency. Was he losing his edge? He really needed to get back in the game.

His attention was drawn back to Candace as she plunked herself down on her mattress, breathing heavily. Was she finished with her early-morning construction explosion?  
No, she was most certainly not. With a tiny yelp, she sprang up off the bed, grabbing up the tools she had dropped on the ground. Kicking her bedroom door wide open, she ran past Perry, out of the room, down the hallway, and down the stairs. Losing no time at all, he hastily followed after her. He heard the sound of the sliding glass door sliding in its frame. Leaping off the top of stairs, and performing an expert roll upon landing at the bottom, he was just in time to watch out the open glass door, in utter amazement, the scene before him. She had gotten ahold of a shovel from somewhere, and was rapidly digging a massive hole in the middle of the yard. Arms flailing like an industrial back-hoe, dirt flew out of the hole at an insane rate of speed. Just two minutes later, Perry's wrist communicator buzzed, alerting him that something was tunneling close to the upper roof of his underground lair. Which was fifty feet underground. _Fifty feet!_ He heard the distinct sound of a shovel scraping on hard rock, and the constant flow of dirt being being flung out of the hole slowed, then ceased altogether. She'd excavated all the way to the layer of bedrock underneath the yard. If the OWCA hadn't artificially lowered the water table around the house when they built his lair, he had no doubt the massive excavation site would be rapidly filling with groundwater.

But even then, she wasn't done. A moment later, Perry saw her climb hand-over-hand out of the huge hole. Dropping the shovel, she grabbed ahold of a screwdriver and a chisel. What was she going to with those? Turning directly at the giant pile of dirt, she ran straight towards it. A buzzing sound filled the air, like that of a chainsaw. A red and white and brown blur darted around and around the pile, circling it like a miniature tornado. His eyes grew impossibly wide as he saw the pile of dirt rapidly begin to assume another shape under the almost supernaturally quick molding it was undergoing. It quickly morphed from a sloppy pile into a neat rectangular box, extending far past the roof of the two-story house into the night sky. And almost as soon it started, the buzzing ceased, and it was done.

The tall rectangular box was no mere box - no, that wouldn't have been ridiculously unbelievable enough. It was a building. Three steps led up to wide double doors, and five rows of windows confirmed that it was five stories tall. The doors were hanging open, somehow swinging on the night breeze, despite the fact that both they, the wall they were hung on, and their hinges were all made entirely of compacted soil - right down the grass and weeds growing out of them.

Candace stood still once again in front of the her wild new creation. For a moment she stood rigidly straight and tall, with the posture of a person who is impossibly proud of themselves. Then, Perry could almost see the wave of exhaustion that hit her like a tsunami. Her shoulders slumped, and she trembled wildly. Turning slowly, she staggered wildly after attempting to take a single step. Perry could see her face in the moonlight. Her eyes were frighteningly red and swollen, and the bags beneath struck pity deep into the secret agent's heart. She reached out a hand, obviously reaching for something to steady herself on, but there was nothing.

In a single rash moment that he would perhaps regret later, Perry darted out into the yard and seized her hand. By the dazed look frozen on her face he could tell that she was far too tired to comprehend what was happening. He bent under her weight as she leaned heavily into the small platypus. He slowly led her into the living room, and helped her collapse onto the couch. But that was all he could safely do - the Agency's in-house surveillance tech would make sure of that.

Leaving the sliding glass door open, to help establish plausible deniability, Perry quietly crept away to his bed in the guest room. As he slowly climbed the stairs, he heard loud snoring wafting from the living room. Smiling that she had found sleep at last, he returned to his own bed. Before settling down, however, he told himself that he was going to be sure to find out more about these strange new developments in the morning.

Even when in the midst of an upbeat musical montage, he had never seen Doofenshmirtz build so large a project so rapidly. That fact that Candace could now suddenly do so was awfully strange. Usually, he would blame Doofenshmirtz for such a development, but now, after the man had given up evil, who was there to blame? Was it possible Candace had just happened into the skill entirely by accident? That explanation didn't sit well with Perry. He had to delve deeper into this strange mystery, but more importantly, he had to do something about the huge new hole in the yard that had almost exposed his lair. How would he be able to fix the hole without being noticed by any of the Flynn-Fletchers?

Of course, being a trained secret agent, Perry had backup plans for pretty much every eventuality, and this time was no exception. He knew just the way to do it: Carl's Flynn-Fletcher robots. Carl had built three robots, one for each member of the Flynn-Fletcher family, and Perry had already used one of them once to cover up a brief absence of Lawrence Fletcher as the Agency tried to restore his memory after a freak accident. It gone off perfectly, and so would be the perfect method to try to resolve the issues in the morning. And if he happened upon some new information about what was going on with Candace, well, that couldn't be helped, now, could it?

* * *

 

Perry woke early the next morning, as he was apt to do. A quick glance out of the window told him that building was still firmly rooted into the backyard. He frowned, unsure why he had sort of subconsciously expected it to be gone. It was a five-story apartment building. Even if it was made from dirt, how could it go anywhere? In pet mode, he walked slowly out of the guest room and into the hall. Linda and Lawrence were still in their room, although muffled conversation, mixed with the sounds of the television told him that they were awake. Padding silently down the stairs, he saw that Candace was still fast asleep on the couch, snoring loudly. Smirking to himself, he quickly walked through the still open glass door into the backyard.

Once outside, and satisfied he was outside of eye shot of his host family, he stood up and whipped on his fedora. Pulling a remote out from the brim of the felt hat, he pressed the button on it. A small panel on the side of the house slid away, revealing a small tube into darkness. Glancing around quickly, to make doubly sure no one was watching, he stepped inside. The panel slid shut after him, giving no indication that it was even there. Perry slid rapidly feet-first through the tube. A moment later, he could see light glowing at the end, and he popped out of the end, directly into his computer chair. Pressing a few buttons on his computer, he placed a call to OWCA headquarters, wanting to gain authorization for use of the robots, if at all possible, without letting them realize the specific reasons behind it.

"Oh, hey, Agent P." said a nasally voice from the screen, as a video flickered to life. "What's going on? We don't have any missions for you yet."

It was Carl the intern. Perry chattered, and with his arms, pantomimed the actions of a robot's arms, hoping the message would be understandable enough.

"You want a robot?" asked Carl. _Yes_ , Perry nodded, but not just any robot. He glanced around for something to indicate which robot he needed. He pantomimed drinking tea, making sure to make a point of his extended pinky.

"You want a British robot?" _Closer_. Perry thought for a moment, then pulled out his Agency-issued cellphone and held it up to his head, pretending to talk rapidly.

"You want a British Candace Flynn robot?" _Almost_. Perry indicated with his hands that there was some separation between the two subjects.

"You want a British robot that has to do with Candace Flynn - oh! You want the Lawrence Fletcher robot!" _Yes_ , Perry nodded again.

"Hmm. Well, I don't see any reason why that wouldn't be okay. Major Monogram isn't here yet, so I guess I'll just authorize you myself. I can do that!"

Perry nodded again. On the screen, Carl pressed a handful of buttons. The sounds of pistons and retracting floors began hissing behind Perry. Turning around, he saw the robot in question standing behind him. Giving a thumbs up, he hopped off the chair and climbed into the robot's pilot recess.

The stack of language dictionaries was still there from Perry's last time using the robot. Quickly scanning all the controls, he was disappointed to discover that the robot still only had four possible speech options. Pressing the few buttons in order, the speakers in the robot said: "Stiff upper lip and all that. If it's okay with Mum, it's okay with me. Lovely windmill, isn't it. Jolly good, Candace."

Hadn't Carl said he was going to work on these? It wasn't a deal breaker, of course. Perry was fairly confident he bluff his way through conversation using using only the handful of phrases. He'd done it before, and so could do it again. Checking to make sure the robots' coolant and fuel tanks were topped off, Perry made it give another thumbs up to Carl on the screen. He pressed a handful buttons, and rocket engines in the robot's feet activated rumbling loudly as they lifted the metal replica off the ground. A tunnel to the surface opened up in the roof of the lair, and he piloted it out of the underground room and into the backyard.

Even from inside the robot, the huge new building was incredibly tall and entirely amazing. Perry turned up the volume of the robot's listening devices, intent on eavesdropping on whatever conversation was going on between the real Lawrence and his family, as they all stood together in the living room. Perry crouched the robot behind the wall of the building, to avoid being seen as he listened in. All he needed to do was wait for Lawrence to leave the eye shot of his family, and he could use the robots extremely powerful vacuum to demolish the building and re-deposit the dirt into the hole. Of course, the family inside would surely realize that the building had suddenly disappeared, but for some reason, Perry didn't think they would particularly mind. He'd have to be very careful to not allow either Candace or Linda to see the robot at the same time as the actual Lawrence, and he'd also need to avoid allowing Lawrence himself to see the robot at all, but he was confident he could manage. He'd done things far harder in his lifetime.

A moment later, the glass door slid open. It was almost time. Lawrence walked out into the backyard, and began unreeling the hose from its hook on the side of the house. Perry's eyes widened slightly. Did he realize that the building was made of dirt? If he got it too wet, it would collapse. No, it seemed he didn't realize. Lawrence had picked up the hose sprayer and turned it full on one wall of the dirt building. This wasn't going to be pretty. Perry watched as cracks began showing up in the side of the building. It began leaning precariously over, and then, finally toppled. When the upper three stories of dry compact dirt collapsed inward, the sheer force of the fall shattered the dirt apart, flung it far and wide over the backyard. The bottom two stories merely shattered apart into muddy goop, and with a resounding splash, sent mud everywhere. Activating the robot's surface wipers, Perry cleaned the mud off the outside of his robot. He saw Candace open the sliding glass door, and quickly ducked behind the lone backyard tree.

"Candace" he heard Lawrence say " Go get your mother. And bring towels. A lot of them. Like, all of them." Candace shut the door and disappeared into the house. A moment later, Lawrence dropped the hose into the mud puddle he was standing in and walked around to the side of the house.

Now was his opportunity. Swiftly moving his hands over the robot's control panels, Perry had it fly around the yard, gather up all the mud with a giant vacuum pack, and dump it into the giant hole Candace had dug, filling it in, and smoothing it over neatly. Congratulating himself on his quick thinking, he decided that no one else at the Agency ever had to know about just how close his lair had come to being compromised. Now - as for his slightly-less official reason behind requesting for the robot. It wasn't a really ethical thing to do, but what could he do if his robot malfunctioned and flew into the house all by itself? He flew it up and through Candace's open bedroom window, setting it down gently on her carpet.

Walking it downstairs, he stumbled onto Linda and Candace in the living room. Uh oh. The living room was pretty closed off - there'd be no way for him to see Lawrence coming. Perry had to get out of here before he walked in, or his cover would be blown. Maybe this hadn't been such a good idea. Candace was looking at him with a strange expression, obviously expecting some sort of conversation. Time for some of that bluffing.

"Stiff upper lip and all that." he said. Candace frowned.

Linda turned to face him and said, "Well, I suppose that worked after all. Great idea, Candace. I'm going to head the Squat n' Stitch now. I'll miss breakfast, but that can't be helped, can it? See you guys in a bit."

"Lovely windmill , isn't it?" Perry had the robot say, as a way of changing the subject.

"I suppose it is. Well, I've really got to go. I'm already gonna be a few minutes late." She rushed out of the room in a hurry. _Okay._ In a worst case scenario, it was just Candace - maybe the Agency would cut him some slack and just give him a stern talking-to after dishing out a mind-wipe. After the second dimension, however, he knew that wasn't likely.

"So..." Candace said awkwardly, staring at the floor, "You want to know how I got so dirty, huh?" Growing increasingly nervous about being in such close proximity to Candace, when the threat of her actual father walking in at any moment was growing by the second, Perry knew he had to wrap up this talk quickly, and then make tracks. He strained the robot's listening devices for sounds of someone approaching, but heard nothing yet.

"As long as it's okay with Mum, it's okay with me."

"What?" She looked confused at his statement. "But... it wasn't okay with her, at least not that I saw?" _C'mon_. Perry really needed her to just let this go.

"Jolly good, Candace."

"Okay, then..." she replied hesitantly. "I'm just gonna go out to the backyard and try make - I mean, do _nothing_. Nothing at all!" Perry caught the quick self correction, and nodded slightly to himself. Something was _definitely_ up with her.

"As long as it's okay with Mum, it's okay with me." he repeated. How long would it be until she got the message?

"Aaaaalrighty then. See you around."

"Jolly good, Candace." _Perfect_.

Candace turned away and walked up the stairs, stopping only once to cast a suspicious glance back at him. He heard the front door open and quickly ducked the robot behind a bookshelf, and none to soon, as Lawrence immediately walked in, wiping his muddied face with a towel. He stopped and stared out at the now squeaky clean backyard.

"I say," he said to himself, "When I asked them for towels, I rather meant for myself, and not for the yard. But they did an excellent job. Guess _I_ should go shower now."

Perry held the robot still as he listened to Lawrence walk up the stairs, down the hall, and into the master bedroom. Hearing the distinctive sound that the master bedroom door made when it closed, he removed the robot from its hiding place and walked it up the stairs as well, stopping at Candace's door to listen and watch. She was talking on the phone.

He listened in as she talked to the other person, her conversation not making much sense without the context.

"Alright, can you quickly tell me how to get one of those?" Pause.

"Okay. Let me call you back." She hung up the phone and for a few minutes did something on the screen which he couldn't see. Then she raised it back to her ear. Then her silence was broken in sudden exclamation.

" _Doofenshmirtz_?! The mayor is Roger Doofenshmirtz! Of course! How could I not remember that?" That seemed a strange way to start a conversation.

"Yes yes yes! Do you know if the mayor has a brother?" A brother? She was asking about _Heinz_? Was it Heinz's fault after all?

"Heinz Doofenshmirtz?" Well, that confirmed it. Perry was growing more confused and concerned by the moment, and he didn't like it one bit.

"Do you know where his brother lives?" And even more. Why on earth did Candace want to get tangled up with Heinz Doofenshmirtz? Could be have something to do with her sudden mechanical aptitude? Or was it something more banal, perhaps having to do with Vanessa? For a moment, Perry considered that. It was definitely a possibility, but still seemed like a very strange way to go about getting into contact with Vanessa.

"Uh, dad? What are you doing?" Uh oh. He'd been busted.

"Jolly good, Candace" he made the robot say, swiftly beating a retreat from the doorway. That was almost very bad. But he had gotten slightly more information than he had had before this whole endeavor, so there was that. It was now time to take the robot back to OWCA - Perry didn't need it anymore anyway.Honestly, it would probably have easier eavesdropping in pet mode. But he'd had to take the robot for building anyway - so it had been worth the shot.

Walking the robot back outside and pressing a button on his lair remote, Perry opened the roof entrance again, and gently flew the robot down into the lair. Closing the roof, he hopped out of the robot and exited the lair, leaving it behind. He didn't need it anymore - for the rest of the day he'd follow Candace from the sky on his jet pack. If she really ended up going to Doofenshmirtz's new house, well, he wanted to be there too. So many things could go wrong if the two of them mixed.

So it was that Perry, jet pack on his back, hovered in the air a few hundred feet above Candace as she left the house that morning. He followed as she got on a city bus and rode through town. He sat gently down on the roof of City Hall and waited as she disappeared inside Danville's largest municipal building. When she walked out again, some forty minutes later, he noticed that she was hanging on to something that she hadn't had when she went in. It looked sort of like a small piece of paper that she was intently reading. Pulling out a pair of binoculars, he zoomed in closely on it and waited for the image to focus.

Okay, this whole situation just got much worse. On the small slip of paper was written only a handful of words: **L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N.** ; and underneath that, _150 Walker Street_.

Perry chittered to himself.

If Candace getting entangled with Heinz had been a bad idea, this was _entirely_ worse. At least Heinz had his good qualities, his redeeming moments, that shone through every now and then. The members of the League Of Villainous Evildoers had no such good sides, not even occasionally. Also, there was the very stark fact that Heinz had quit evil, (and had so far stuck to his word), while the League was mostly definitely still involved in less than legal exploits. But how was he to stop her? He couldn't just take the card - that would blow his cover, and she'd probably just go to the address anyway out of curiosity. Perry looked on helplessly as a bus slowly pulled up next to the stop and Candace boarded. He didn't like feeling helpless. He was a highly-trained secret agent, he shouldn't be helpless. But what could he do? He could derail the bus, and delay it, or send it somewhere else, but the seed was planted already. If Candace really wanted to go there, she'd just walk, and Perry would be unable to stop that without blowing his cover. Major Monogram had said it hadn't easy for him to convince the higher-ups in the federal government to let Perry remain an active-duty agent after the second dimension fiasco. Even though the amnesia-inator was still working, it was highly doubtful that he'd be allowed to remain with the Flynn-Fletchers if he revealed himself again. He followed closely behind the bus as it pulled to a stop a mere six blocks away from the fated address. The doors swung open, and Candace stepped out. She looked around, seemingly surveying her surroundings, and began walking quickly down the sidewalk.

Perry's brain raced through the possible options. It seemed he'd have to choose - either have Candace meet Doofenshmirtz or run in with L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N. Neither one seemed particularly desirable, but one was clearly the lesser of the two evils. Gunning the engine on his jet pack, he raced through the air until he was a few city blocks ahead of Candace's walking path. Whipping out his O.W.C.A-issued notepad, he hastily scribbled down: _Heinz Doofenshmirtz, 493 Crownridge Loop_.

Pausing briefly, he wondered how he could make sure that Candace would trust the note. Obviously he couldn't sign it with his actual name, but he had to write something at least half-way trustworthy sounding. After a moment he came up with the perfect signature: something that concealed his identity, while still giving the impression that he knew Candace at least somewhat well. Hopefully she wouldn't be creeped out by it. Perry quickly shrugged that notion off. Candace's mind was notorious for its one-way traffic. If she wanted to find Doofenshmirtz, she would probably not care if the information that led to him came from a man dressed entirely in prison stripes and wearing a ski mask. Estimating the wind speed and direction, Perry dropped the slip of paper into the currents of air, and watched as it flipped and tumbled down through the wind to the walking girl.

Shaking his head, Perry wondered if she would ever know the danger she had come so close to falling into. Not it he could help it, she wouldn't. His wrist communicator beeped. Looking down, he saw a familiar notification. OWCA needed him again! He had a mission. Smiling to himself, he squeezed the throttle on his jet pack and gunned away into the sky. He'd done pretty much all he could here. Only time would tell how successful he had been.

* * *

Walking headfirst into the wind, for the first time since the end of March, Candace felt a chill creep underneath her clothes. Eyeing the state of the streets around her, she couldn't help but wonder what kind of organization would have its location in such an abandoned part of town. All around the road stood rows of old warehouses.

A dull ache had started building up behind her forehead. Rubbing it to no effect, she drew her arms closer around her, put her head down, and started walking faster.

"Huh? Whatsits?" A piece of paper, flung by the wind, had blown into her face. Pulling it down, she unfolded and read it.

_Heinz Doofenshmirtz, 493 Crownridge Loop - I'm closer to you than you think, though you can't see me and we can't communicate through normal means. Good luck, Candace Gertrude Flynn._

For a moment, she stood stock-still, frozen in place like a statue. Could this be? A violent shiver ran up and down her spine, and her eyes began boiling over with tears.

"Phineas and Ferb" she whispered. "But, how - Thank you!"

Even when they were trapped beyond the realm of space and time, her brothers had come through for her, helped her in her time of need. How they had managed to get this note back into the space-time continuum was a question that really didn't matter to her then. Any doubts her brain could have raised to the source of the note were rapidly drowned and washed away in a sudden outpouring of emotion from her heart. She really couldn't have cared less about they managed to do it, or why they had been so ambiguous. Clutching it tightly to her chest, she sniffled again. Here was proof that her brothers were still okay. Here was proof that they knew, as they always did.

"I won't let you guys down" she said aloud, wiping the leaking tears off of her face. Her drive, her motivation, her reasons for doing all of this were instantly completely restored. Phineas and Ferb were alright. They were watching her. They sent her a note when she needed help.

"Phineas, Ferb" she spoke aloud again, "I don't know if you can hear me - but if you can, I just want you to kno- owwwww!" Her sentence was brutally cut short by a sudden splitting pain and wave of nausea bursting into her head - the same one that she had felt last night. Collapsing into a crouching position, with her head between her knees, she felt another shudder travel up and down her spine, although this one was infinitely more violent and not brought on by a sudden spurt of happiness. A pained whimper escaped her lips without her permission. Forcing herself to stand up again, she staggered wildly, barely able to balance against the rapidly escalating throbbing behind her eyes. It felt as if a drummer was pounding on her skull.

Casting her eyes about crazily, she desperately looked about for something make. There was only one way to get this thing to go away, and that was to build - so build she would. Her brothers were counting on her, weren't they? They had sent her a note from beyond space and time giving her useful information. How could she let them down now?

A van sitting across the street captured her attention. This would do. Not stopping to give a thought to whom the van might belong to, she ran half-staggering over to it. The van's back doors were unlocked and opened easily when she pulled on them. Inside the bed of the van was a huge toolbox, filled the brim to various exotic devices. A number of advanced computer parts lie on the bed of van next of the toolbox. Seizing them with a maddened look in her eye, she got to work.

In motions so quick the eye could hardly follow, she dismantled the van into so many pieces of scrap metal. Rapidly grabbing ahold of the pieces left behind by the disassembly, she re-appropriated them for her own purposes. Darting back and forth across the street, she put together two identical-looking metal pads on either side of the abandoned road. Next to one of them she built up a small computer panel. Rapidly typing, she programmed a supercomputer in all of the time it takes a person to read this sentence. Seconds later, her device was done - and operational.

Stepping back onto one of the pads she had built, she pressed a button on the keyboard. In a flash of light, she was dematerialized. Instantaneously, she re-materialized on the pad on the opposite side of the road. It was a working teleporter. Taking a step back off the pad, Candace leaned heavily back against one of the warehouses and took several deep breaths. The insatiable drive for creativity had once again been temporarily sated. The pain and nausea in her head slowly drained away as she continued her heavy breathing. Once her heart rate and and breaths had settled back into a more normal pattern, she looked at her creation. She was mildly amazed, not so much at the technology itself, nor so much at the fact that it had been almost entirely from the pieces of a single van, but more so at the fact she had built it. Even though she had built the apartment building last night, there's something different about building a working piece of physics-defying technology.

_Faster-than-light travel_. Not so impossible after all, she thought.

"Well, Phineas," she said at last, "You were right. You said you believed in me, you said that I could do whatever I wanted. You were right again, though I guess I shouldn't really be surprised at that."

She involuntarily shuddered. She hadn't exactly done whatever she _wanted_ \- she had built it to escape the splitting pain inside herself, as if she was being held hostage by her own conscious knowledge of the universe. How could you not build, create, invent, and improve on things when you had such a grasp on everything? Something in the idea went contrary to everything she knew.

Kicking the side of the metal pad next to her, she realized that, written on the side of one of the metal sheets, was a now very familiar word: **L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N.** Now that her immediate need to innovate had been pacified, she realized that she had consumed someone else's property in her rush to ease the urge. Wrinkling her brow, she wondered about the feasibility of restoring the teleporters to their original state. Surely it could be done - building a working van out of a teleportation system had to be less complex than building a working teleportation system out of a van. Stepping back onto the teleporter pad, she was instantly transported to the other side of the road, where she had left the tools. Picking them up, she tried to imagine taking apart the teleporters and putting the van back together. She could do this.

Sure enough, just a handful of minutes later, the teleporters had disappeared, and the van was sitting back in the original spot. It wasn't exactly the same as before - despite her best efforts, she hadn't been able to resist upgrading the clunky parts under the hood with a brand new perpetual-power 700,000 horsepower proton plasma infused cold fusion reactor.

"Maybe whoever owns it won't notice" she mumbled under breath. Pulling out her phone, she realized that the time was now 1:15 PM. She needed to get a move on if she was going to get to Doofenshmirtz's house before 2:00 - it was all the way across town and would take the bus at least forty-five minutes to travel that distance.

"Alright, guys" she said aloud, putting the phone back in her pocket and setting back out for the bus stop, " I'm heading off now. I'll have you back in just a little bit of time. I promise."

She glanced around, and briskly strode away, leaving the abandoned warehouse street behind her.

But it hadn't been _entirely_ abandoned. Stepping out of his concealing location, a bald-headed man leaned out in the street to make sure Candace was out of eye shot. When he judged that she was sufficiently far away, he stepped over to his van and pulled up the hood. Bright green glow from the new reactor brilliantly illuminated his face, as it twisted into a foul-looking grin. His practiced eye swept over the modifications made to the clunker's old engine, and his experienced brain told him that here was technology many millennia too advanced for its time, what with the breaking the laws of thermodynamics and all.

"It's beautiful," he said under his breath in a high, squeaky voice. Patting the surface of the reactor, he reached deep into the pocket of his lab coat and produced a cell phone of his own.

"I want to speak to Dr. Bloodpudding," he said, then paused.

"Hello, my friend. This is Aloyse Everheart Elizabeth Otto Wolfgang - no! - Don't call me that! You will - ugh! Never mind. I've got great news. I think I've finally found a way we can turn the tide against OWCA."

"What? Why, you - "

"Well, I never - "

"Well, you laugh all you want,then. When _I_ take over the world, you'll be wishing you hadn't."

The man snapped his cellphone shut and giggled maniacally under his breath. Reaching into his pocket, he produced a pair of tweezers and a plastic bag. Reaching under the hood with his tweezers, he carefully pulled out a long, bright, orange hair that had been entangled on a protruding sprocket.

"Just who are you, my little miracle worker?" he said to himself, gently dropping the hair into the plastic bag and sealing it shut. He placed the bag and tweezers back into his pocket, and then shut the hood and climbed into the van. Starting it up, he slowly pulled away from the curb and drove down the street.

* * *

 

Completely unaware of the strange goings-on behind her, Candace marched resolutely down to the bus stop and waited for the public transport vehicle to come and carry her to Crownridge Loop. Sitting by herself at the abandoned bus stop, she had plenty of time to think.

How did she intend to get Doofenshmirtz to let her use the machine he had anyway? Perhaps she could create a - create a _nothing_ , she told herself. She had to find out a way to get rid of this thing. She couldn't go through life like this. Just because Phineas and Ferb were able to handle it, didn't mean she could. Maybe she could build some sort brain-wave modification device to manually erase this part of her memory. Or ... she thought back to the day when Phineas and Ferb had been so strangely out of character. They had been so boring that day - not wanting to anything but lay around and watch grass grow. Somebody had suggested that it seemed as if they had been hit with a Dull-and-Boring ray. Candace wondered what being dull and boring had been like for them, on the inside. She didn't particularly want to be dull and boring, but it would surely be better than this. She couldn't handle this thing inside of her now. How could she ever have a normal relationship, when ever so often she was forced, more or less against her will, to create things? Phineas and Ferb would understand of course, and the sibling bond between the three of them would no doubt become irrevocably stronger, but _that_ relationship wasn't the one Candace was worried about. She thought of Jeremy. How could he understand what it was like for her? She had had no idea what it had been like for her brothers, though to be fair, they hadn't ever told her. Would he understand? Would he - would he still want to be her boyfriend?

It was a terrifying thing to think about, and a subject that she really didn't want to ever be forced to deal with. Even though it was rapidly approaching a point of inevitability, Candace forcibly ended the train of thought. She had to endure it for just a little bit more - just until she got her brothers back. Once they were safe, then she could think about getting back to normal. Maybe Phineas and Ferb would even be able to change her back. For a moment, she wondered if either of her brothers had ever wished that their supernatural gift would just go away. Had they ever wished that they could just be normal, content to ride roller coasters built by other people and travel through the air at sub-sonic speeds? Had they wished that they were able just sit back and do nothing?

Of course, that was a problem in and of itself - they _were_ able to sit back and do nothing, at least to some degree. She could clearly remember the day, not to many months ago, when they had decided to do so. How they had been able to withstand the internal urge to build was beyond her. When the desire struck her, all her will power would be shattered in moment, blown into smithereens by an all-conquering drive for innovation. The headaches alone were severe enough to make her willing to do anything to make them stop. How do you will away physical pain?

Something else about Phineas and Ferb's lazy day stirred up inside Candace's memory. That day was the only day she had ever felt anything close to the feelings she felt now. Even though now they were immensely stronger, she could clearly remember how the urge to create had bubbled up inside her even then. Could it be that this had always been inside of her, sleeping, previously kept under control merely by watching Phineas and Ferb do things? And now, with them gone, it had broken loose, allowing her grasp the secrets of the universe and filling her mind with the same sort of feeling, only many times greater.

The hissing of pneumatic brakes jarred into her thoughts. The bus was here. Hastily standing up, she boarded it, flashing her bus pass at the scanner as she did so. Sitting down on the hard seats, she patted the pocket that contained Phineas and Ferb's note from the beyond. She couldn't - wouldn't - let them down. Their very lives depended on it, and she would not be able to handle going through life knowing that their innocent blood had been shed because she had given up her quest to save them over some silly thing like a psyche-warping pressure to construct things.

She waited pensively in her chair as the bus made its rounds through the city. People boarded and rode for bit, then got off. With her eyes locked on the digital clock mounted inside the bus, she watched it slowly tick closer and closer to 2:00 PM. After a long, long ride, the bus finally pulled into the stop at the entrance of the Kingsman Streets - the neighborhood in which Crownridge Loop could be found. Debarking the public transit that she had found herself growing increasingly thankful for over the past few days, she began the short walk into the shaded neighborhood. Unlike her home street, here tall trees and telephone poles towered up on the sides of the roads, layering a thick blanket of shade on the sidewalk. It was probably great in the middle of summer, but here, in the early days of fall, a chill had begun lingering in the darkness. Shaking her arms against the growing chill, she pressed forwards into the neighborhood. It wasn't much farther now - just two more blocks down and a turn to the left.

When she finally stood in front of 493 Crownridge Loop - the first thing she thought was " _Is this right?_ " She double-checked the address. The house was a modest one-story brick home that in no way gave off the air that an inventor resided within. The grass in the yard was just barely reaching the point at which one might call it long, and the car in the driveway was a decidedly normal-looking gray sedan. Candace walked up the driveway and onto the small patio. Just before ringing the doorbell, however, she heard voices that seemed to come from the back of the house.

" _Behold!_ The _Lawn-Mow-inator!_ With this I can cut all my grass in the blink of an eye! It's the ultimate grass cutting machine!" That had to be Doofenshmirtz. She hadn't talked to him much, but was fairly sure of his voice. He had this distinct accent - it was rather easily recognizable.

"Daaaaaad, come on. You said you'd be done this _morning_ , so we could drive to the mall. Can't you just use the regular lawn mower?" That was definitely Vanessa's voice, tinged with apathy and tiredness.

"DO THE GRASS CUTTING MUSICAL NUMBER, SIR." said another voice, in an entirely too loud monotone. Who was that?

"If you insist," said Doofenshmirtz. There was a pause, then loud music started up.

"Weeell ,if you've got a lawn to mow, But you really need to go - - -" The music abruptly cut off with a squeal.

"Dad!" Vanessa said, "Please. Not the musical number. Just turn it on and cut the grass."

"Oh, well." Doofenshmirtz relented. "I guess I can do the musical later. Alright, honey, let me just fire it up."

Candace heard a loud high-pitched whine, building in intensity over the course of several seconds.

"It's wooooorking!"

Then - _KRAKOOOOOOM_!

The ground vibrated for a moment in the aftermath of the explosion. A hunk of smoking metal hurtled to the ground, clanging on the concrete driveway dangerously close to Candace. The smell of smoke and burning grass filled the air.

"Okay, who pressed the self-destruct button?" she heard Doofenshmirtz ask.

"YOU DID, SIR." said the loud voice again.

"Oh."

"Daaaaaaaad, just leave it. Let's just go to mall now. You can fix it later."

"Alright, honey. Fine. Let me go and change my clothes. These are a bit ... singed."

"JUST A BIT, SIR."

Candace heard the sound of a screen door opening, and then clanging shut. Doofenshmirtz (presumably) had gone back inside the house. Stepping forwards, she mashed the doorbell repeatedly. She heard unintelligible mumbling coming from the inside of the house. In a moment, the front door swung open, and Doofenshmirtz stood in front of her, face and clothing entirely blackened to the color of coal.

"Do I know you?" he asked. "Wait, are you one of Vanessa's friends?" He took in a breath, obviously getting ready to call for his daughter, but Candace interrupted before he could do so.

"No no," she said, "Well, I mean, yes, but right now, I need to talk to you."

"Me?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, you. Do you remember a few days ago when you had built that thing you called a Do-Over-Inator and I turned it on and..."

"So you _did_ purposefully turn it on?" he cut in to say.

"What? I did, but that's not important. I need you to turn it back on."

"Turn it back on?" He smiled at her. "Girl, that inator was tearing the space-time continuum apart. I can't turn it back on. If you haven't noticed - spoons no longer exist anymore. If I hadn't destroyed it, it could've erased everything."

Candace did a double-take. "You _destroyed_ it?"

"Well, yeah. What did you not get about ' _it could've erased everything_ '?"

"Can you rebuild it?"

Doofenshmirtz's face twisted up. "Seriously. This is the third time now I've said _it could've erased everything_ \- how can you not get that? You're worse than underwater welders, I swear, and they are a thick-headed bunch."

Ignoring the strange insult, Candace burst forth into a tearful shout: "It erased my brothers!"

Doofenshmirtz paused, glancing back and forth. "It did? How do you know they didn't just run away or ... "

Candace burst into tears. "I was standing there! Right in front of them! A space-time rift opened up behind them, and they got sucked in, and ... and ... and ..." her sentence trailed off into sobbing.

Doofenshmirtz nervously reached out and laid a soot-covered hand on her shoulder. "Hey, uh, look here, listen up, uh..." He was entirely unsure of how to deal with the situation at hand, and internally wished that his daughter would come and find him, to help ease the awkwardness of the situation.

"How about I just tell you how to build a space-time ripper instead?" he lamely offered.

Candace looked up, tears still running down her face. "I - I know how to build a space-time ripper" she stammered out. "I just don't have the money for supplies."

"Oh." Not even stopping to think on the strangeness that the teenager in front of him knew how to build a space-time ripper, Doofenshmirtz pulled back his hand, wincing slightly at the sooty hand print he had left behind.

"Uh, tell you what. I've given up evil, which makes it really hard for me to help you. But..." and he let his sentence die. What could he do? Tell her to turn to evil? It was a satisfying business, especially if one did it for the right reasons, such as deep-seated personal grudges, but he knew that he promised Vanessa that he would sever himself completely from his evil life, and so he let the words die on his tongue. It was a real conundrum. Maybe a Make-Up-Your-Mind-Inator would help him right now.

Candace's tears had mostly dried, and she sniffled and wiped the remainder off her face.

"I-I thought you would still have it," she said, "Or at least would have the stuff to make it. I could easily build one, but I don't have the supplies."

Candace fumbled in her pocket, until she laid ahold on the picture of her two brothers she had gotten from the Martians. Pulling it out, she showed it to Doofenshmirtz, but still kept it solidly in her own hand.

He squinted at the grainy shot. "How can these be your brothers? If they fell into a space-time rift, all traces of them should have been wiped from the universe."

"Because they've time traveled," Candace started to explain. Doofenshmirtz nodded.

"Or traveled more quickly than the speed of light," he mumbled. "Quantum locking. Well, duh."

Candace nodded. "I've found bits and pieces of stuff they've made," she continued, "Like a time machine, and stuff."

Doofenshmirtz nodded again. "Well, yeah, that would make sense." he said. "Anything that's traveled beyond light speed or through time, or is larger than the size of a small moon is much more resistant to quantum entanglement."

Candace knew that already. But, as she heard it spoken aloud to her, something in her mind clicked, setting off a chain reaction of buried memories. Like a thunderclap from the heavens, a powerful realization shattered into her conscious mind. A 240,000 mile tall building. A haughty boy working math and condescendingly telling her: "No force on earth could move this building before your mother comes home." Doofenshmirtz's last words replayed in her mind. The size of a small moon. _The size of a small moon._ Gears began turning in her brain. Of course! It would still be there - it was vastly larger than a small moon. Candace suddenly reached out and pulled a screwdriver out of Doofenshmirtz's charred lab coat.

"Hey!" he exclaimed, but she ignored him. She stuffed the photo away and pulled out her cell phone.

"R.I.P. Phonsie," she muttered, flipping it over and prying the back off, exposing it's internal workings. Carefully manipulating the tip of the screwdriver, she tore out the internet receiver and tossed it to the ground beside her. Using the screwdriver, she moved transistor connections back and forth, fundamentally altering how the phone's GPS worked. A second later, she turned it back over and woke up the screen. It flashed over with static for a brief moment, then was clear - and filled with a GPS image of the moon.

Doofenshmirtz leaned over and looked at the screen, shaking soot particles off as he moved.

The moon's image was not what a normal person would expect. Instead of a roughly round sphere, it was a roughly round sphere with a long handle jutting out of one side, making it look somewhat like an abnormally long-handled spoon.

"Ah ha ha ha ha!" she excitedly exclaimed, shoving the image in Doofenshmirtz's face. "Would you look at that? Look at it! _That's no moon!_ " And she turned and began running back down the driveway, away from the house.

"Uh... sure?" Doofenshmirtz said to himself as he watched her sprint away into the early fall afternoon.

"Dad. Really? What have you been doing in here?" His eyes widened. Uh oh.

* * *

Candace could hardly contain herself on the bus ride back home. All her problems were solved now. It was just a matter of time. The giant building Phineas and Ferb had been big enough to avoid retroactive erasure by the space-time continuum. It was still there, stuck to the moon, filled with materials she could freely scavenge for space-time ripper supplies. Her feet tapped on the floor of the bus impatiently. Couldn't this thing go any faster? She twitched in her seat, barely able to contain herself. It was almost time - she was really going to do it, really going to make it. Phineas and Ferb would be saved, all thanks to the day that they had decided to construct the world's tallest building. All she had to do was travel to the moon, which was a small obstacle, easily circumvented. It was only rocket science, after all. After entirely too long, the bus pulled into the Arbor Estates stop, and Candace shot out of it faster than the rocket she was going to make. She sprinted the entire distance between the bus stop and house, flying over the short distance in record time.

Arriving at home, she saw that her mother had already come home from the Squat n' Stitch, leaving the red station wagon parked in the driveway. Perfect. She kicked through the wooden gate into the backyard, and gathered up the tools she had left so haplessly lying around last night. Running back around to the front of the house, she let them clatter to the ground next to the car. It would do perfectly, it just needed a bit of - reworking. Seizing a hammer and screwdriver, she set to work. Hearing the cacophony of pounding and buzzing suddenly bursting from their front driveway, her parents questioningly emerged from the house, intent on seeing just what was causing all of the sudden racket.

They were stunned beyond all belief at the scene in the driveway. The station wagon was no longer recognizable as such - it had been completely dismantled and reassembled into a red rocket, standing upright on the cement. Their _daughter_ , if one could believe it, was the one banging, and drilling, and welding it together. With broad, crude strokes, she had painted _The P &F_ on the side of the rocket, and was even now perched atop it, pounding something into the nose cone.

"Candace!" Linda Flynn-Fletcher shouted, but her voice went unheard, and her warning unheeded by the girl on the make-shift spacecraft. What was going on?

In a single fluid motion, Candace shut the nose cone, and slid down the side of the rocket. She scooped up something that looked suspiciously like a space helmet made out of an old fishbowl, and tucked it under her arm. She grabbed onto a small ladder, and entered a hatch on the outside of the ship. Moments later, loud rumbling reverberated from it, shaking the entire neighborhood. Linda and Lawrence cowered back, sheltering their faces, both sure that it was going to explode into bits, taking the life of their daughter as it did so.

But explode it did not - instead, a huge blue flame lashed out from the rocket, licking the cement beneath it. Smoke billowed everywhere as the rocket slowly lifted off the ground. Once in the air, it began going faster and faster, soaring high into the sky, leaving only a trail of smoke and charred spot on driveway behind. Her parents were speechless.

"Did-did-did-Candace just fly away in a r-r-r-rocket?" Linda stammered madly. The smoke still lingering in the air served only to confirm what her eyes had suggested. There was no answer.

On board the small ship, Candace clutched controls as the force of liftoff pushed her bodily back into her seat. The engines shook the craft violently, but she was fully confident in her creation. The sounds of the engines and the beeping of the control panel was cut in on by crackling from the radio.

"This is Tower 9032. Unidentified aircraft in the southwest sector, please identify yourself."

"This is Tower 9032. Unidentified aircraft in the southwest sector, _please_ identify yourself."

"This is Tower - Tower - 9 - 9 -" the signal fractured badly and dropped as the rocket soared through the air, punctured into the exosphere, leaving the atmosphere of earth behind. Even though she was strapped into the seat, Candace could feel the force gluing her to it lessening. Pressing the release button on the straps, she gently drifted away, up into the air, hovering effortlessly. Pressing another button on the dash, she activated a cloaking device that would allow her ship to sneak past all manner of radar and infrared tracking systems undetected. The moon was only a few hundred thousand miles away. She glanced at the speedometer.

1.7 million miles an hour.

Perfect. She'd be at the moon in just over fifteen minutes. Now all there was to do was wait.

 


	6. Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures

The endless void of space stretched in all directions out of the window of the rocket ship. Millions of tiny twinkling stars dotted the blackness, the cold pinpricks of light a constant reminder of the sheer loneliness of the two hundred and fifty thousand miles of deep space between the earth and the moon. The ship's quiet vibrations were only indication of the powerful engine thrusting it along at almost two million miles an hour. The only sounds that could be heard in the cramped cabin was the muffled beeping of the small control panel. A soft blue glow dimly illuminated the area, casting its dull shine on Candace's face. Her breath was coming in short ragged bursts as she stolidly stared out of the craft's windscreen. Even though she was more than confident that her rocket could safely carry her to the moon and back, that knowledge was meager comfort as she rode it hurtling through the void at 2,000 times the speed of sound. There was no sense of motion, no feeling of acceleration to indicate that she was indeed traveling that quickly. Only the slowly receding earth behind was any evidence to it.

Grabbing ahold of the joystick in front of her, she used it as leverage to pull herself down into the seat. Tilting the stick to the left, she banked the rocket back and to the left, aligning with a direct path to the moon. There it was - a grayish white orb hanging effortlessly in space, just behind the blue and green and white sphere of the earth that she had so rapidly left behind. As she watched the rocky satellite grow slowly closer, something sticking into it came into focus. The giant building, so tall that it would take light from a flashlight an entire second to reach the top, was jutting out of the back side of the moon, at a perfect angle so as to always keep it hidden from the watching Earth.

Candace still remembered the strange confusion that had shown up on the news a few days after Phineas and Ferb had built the building. Space scientists the world over had their entire understanding of the heavens shattered, when they discovered that the moon had somehow perfectly rotated in a 180 degree angle, revealing its dark side to the earth, and concealing the light side in permanent shadow. No one knew what could have happened - and, of course, she had suspected that Phineas and Ferb had done on purpose to get rid of their building. But they had denied doing so, saying that the building had moved entirely on its own. Eventually she had settled on the idea that aliens had done it, for whatever reason. She had also assumed that aliens were the culprits for that day when the Earth had just seemingly randomly decided to move away from the sun, requiring incredible effort from her brothers and friends to return the planet to its proper orbit.

Meap had said that moving planets or rotating moons were not the sort of things aliens generally went about doing, and that he had no records of anyone doing so anyway. Still, she had harbored the explanation in heart, as a fairly mundane way of understanding the sometimes inexplicable events that occurred around her. She shook her head, attempting to move her hair out of the way of her vision. Without gravity, it was floating randomly everywhere, and being quite annoying. Wasn't it sad that _alien intervention_ was a mundane thing to her? Why couldn't she just deal with brothers who broke plates or scratched records? Why did they - and now her - have to go around breaking the laws of physics everyday? It would be enough to drive anyone off the deep end, and yet, despite all the insanity she saw and went through in all the summers preceding this one, she had fairly easily dealt with it. Candace had no memories of times before her brothers - she only knew what her mother told her. Her memories of times when Phineas was too young to do what he did now, or before Ferb was adopted were extremely fragmented and faint. For as long as she could clearly remember, it had always been this way. And she had never really thought any different of it - when you grow up around something, it just becomes a part of you. And it was a part that she wasn't going to let go, even if she had to travel to the end of the universe to get it back. Thankfully, however, a trip to the end of the universe was not necessary. Instead, she just needed to travel to the moon. And she was here.

Well, not exactly at the _moon_. She was still a good 250,000 miles away from the moon, but was fast approaching the base of the world's tallest building. Turning on the reverse thrusters, the rocket ship began the long process of decelerating from the immense speeds that had allowed it to travel almost 500,000 miles in twenty minutes. As the ship was coming to halt, Candace pushed herself up off the driver's seat and floated to the back of the tiny cabin. She hesitated for a moment, briefly becoming frightened at the thought of the impending spacewalk she would be taking. Sliding into the baggy space suit and fastening her helmet, she pressed on, still afraid, but working in spite of it - it wasn't like she had any other option, really. The console beeped and flashed, telling her that the ship had come as close to stop as was possible. The ship was still traveling at 2,800 miles an hour, but it was matching the orbiting speed of the moon, making it motionless in comparison to the base of the building just twenty feet away. Double-checking that her air tank had plenty of oxygen, she found a coil of rope she had brought along for just this reason, and tied it tightly around one ankle. Using a combination of awkward swimming motions and pulling herself along handles, she floated into the airlock. Sealing the interior doors, she firmly knotted the free end of the rope around a metal handle, and taking a deep breath, opened the exterior doors.

A gauge on the wall indicated the process of the air in the lock draining away. Once the air was completely gone, the external door soundlessly slid open, revealing the empty void of space stretching away endlessly in all directions.

"I can do this," Candace said aloud, her voice echoing inside the helmet. With a decisive shove, she sent herself drifting gently out of the rocket, towards the concrete structure nearby. She laid a sweaty grip on a steel girder jutting out of the bottom, and willed herself to not look at the infinity of nothingness below her.

"Uh, who is this?" a crackly voice burst over her radio headset, shattering the otherwise perfect silence, and giving her such a start she lost her grip on the girder and flailed about for a few frightening seconds before getting ahold of it again. The voice came again.

"I said, who is this? We've found your transponder channel during routine scans and they indicate you are far beyond the moon."

"Uh, how about you tell me who you are first?" the response was childish, and a bit unthinking, but it tumbled from her mouth before she could stop it.

"This is Captain Daniel Brown, on board the International Space Station, I.D. number 4305. I repeat, who are you? There's no scheduled flights here for another month."

"I'm - uh ... " Candace paused. Should she give her real name? It wasn't, like, against the _law_ to fly a rocket ship into space, was it? Unless... was there some sort of special paperwork or license she needed? Everything on Earth did seem to have been locked behind piles of licenses and permits.

"Well?"

"Candace!" Oops. "Uh, Candace Smith." She rolled her eyes at her own terrible pseudonym and began the short climb from the protruding girder to the main entrance of the building. Once inside it, she could begin taking pieces of it apart, and putting them back in the ship.

"Candace Smith?" the voice questioned. "There are no records of that name on any space agency's records. And how are you so far beyond the moon?"

"I flew here. In a rocket ship." They knew she was here, and so could probably figure that much anyway. And so what if it was technically illegal. The entire course of space and time would be rewritten once she got her brothers back anyway.

"But who sent you? What country do you come from? Why is your rocket invisible to our radar? Why do we have no schedule for your flight? Why are you so far away from Earth?"

She had made it inside the building. So many months spent orbiting the earth in space, unmaintained, had not been particularly kind to the huge building. Jagged holes dotted it here and there, presumably caused by impact with meteors. Candace pulled a crowbar out of a pocket in the space suit and began prying a metal sheet off the wall. The metal resisted, but slowly bent and crunched soundlessly under her efforts. Behind the panel a large bundle of wires could be seen, along with a thick wad of insulation and wide pipe labelled "Water".

The voice over the radio crackled back. The crew of the ISS wasn't giving up anytime soon.

"Smith! Smith! Do you read me? Listen, we don't how you got way out there, or how you intend to get back, but whatever space agency sent you that far can probably get you home. We're not trying to be hostile, but you've gotta tell us when you start returning to earth so we don't hit each other."

"If I wanted to hit you, you couldn't get out of my way fast enough with a three hour head start." she retorted, growing a bit exasperated. "My ship has a top speed of Mach 2500, and that's just running on normal unleaded. If I had premium, I could probably crank out another 500 or so."

"Mach 2500?" The tone of the response was incredulous. "That's impossible. With speeds like that you could've gotten from Earth to where you are in like ... twenty minutes."  
Candace smiled. _Impossible_. If you wanted to talk to someone stopped by the impossible, you shouldn't be talking to the Flynn children.

"Nothing is impossible except impossibility." she answered, cutting wires out of the wall and stuffing them in a pocket on the space suit. "And, yes, twenty-five minutes ago I _was_ on Earth."

"I don't if I believe you. I mean, the New Horizons Probe record for fastest spacecraft was like 40,000 miles an hour - but you're saying you've beaten that by like, I don't know, 1.96 million miles an hour."

"Please. If I was setting speed records, I'd be going 2500 times the speed of _light_ , not sound."

Laughter sounded over the mic.

"Ha! You're a funny one, Smith. Now I know that is, in fact, impossible."

"Is it?"

"...yes?"

Candace smiled to herself. This back and forth about her spacecraft was proving remarkably satisfying. She kind of understood now why Phineas occasionally went on at length about his projects. If she hadn't been in such a hurry, she might've been inclined to stop by the space station to prove her claims. But as it was, they'd just have to continue wondering. The conversation between her and the space station crew member died out as she stopped talking, instead concentrating on the task at hand: stripping load after load of supplies from the Tallest Building in the World, and putting them in the rocket. Sheets of metal, miles of wiring, and various electrical components. Panes of glass, light bulbs, and an elevator shaft drive motor. Strips of rubber insulation, halogen tubes, and wooden beams. After several large loads of supplies were piled in the rocket, she paused and looked at them.

They were building supplies - which should have made sense, honestly, since they _did_ come from a building. But where was she going to get ahold of the nuclear fuel rods, and the ionization matrices and the Pizzazium Infinionite she needed? There were 127 million stories in the building, but it was just that, a building. A very large building, no doubt, but a fairly normal one nonetheless. And the collection of stuff she had stripped from its walls, that was now floating gently around the small cargo bay, was just that: building supplies. With them, Candace could have built another apartment building, or even a skyscraper, or a new housing development. But not a device to rip space and time.

In her haste to get up here, the fact this would likely be the result of her trip hadn't occurred to her. This ginormous building had been her last, best, resort for getting ahold of the supplies she needed. If they weren't here, how would she be able to get the things she needed before Phineas and Ferb starved or dehydrated, dying frightened and alone, in a dimension beyond reality?

Candace looked back over at the building, with its bottom story now stripped down to bare steel girders and concrete frame. She had torn it down to a skeleton, and found nothing beyond ordinary construction materials. There was still a tiny sliver of hope: the faint chance that on one of the 127 million floors of the building there had been built a nuclear reactor or something of the sort.

Returning to the rocket, she unknotted the rope from her ankle and tied it tightly to one of the steel girders she had exposed recently. Once free of the ship, she slowly pulled herself along the building's walls and into the elevator shaft, stopping to look in some of the floors of the building as she did so. But no quantum mechanics floors could be found. There was a chess floor, a floor filled rubber balls, and one filled with new-in-box action figures. There was even a floor that looked awfully like an office, with random papers and office equipment scattered through the air - or lack of it - floating freely about in the lack of gravity. She made it all the way to floor five hundred and sixty three before her oxygen tank warned her that it was halfway run down. Having no choice but to return to the ship, she dejectedly turned around and pushed herself back down the shaft. Although five hundred and sixty three floors was less than a hundred thousandth of the total number floors in the building, Candace knew that only the lower 25,000 floors actually had stuff in them. The upper millions had been in space, when the building was still on Earth, and so were left mostly empty, due to a lack of oxygen. It was just easier to have empty floors instead of pumping atmosphere for them all, and really, it wasn't like the lower floors were hurting for space anyways.

Arriving at the bottom of the elevator shaft, Candace slowly pulled herself along the floor, eventually finding the rope she had used to tie her rocket ship to the building. Undoing it, she pulled herself into the ship, and sealed the doors. As the airlock refilled with air, she took off her helmet, and took a deep breath, forcing herself to hold back the tears threatening to spill over. What now? There seemed to be truly no way to get the supplies she needed. Even the giant space building didn't have them. Her self-control, weakened by the fact that she was the only living creature around for hundreds of thousands of miles, fractured under the pressure, and tears spilled from her eyes, collecting in small droplets of liquid floating in the air. Maybe she could just stay here, alone in deep space, and hide her failure from the rest of the world. She brought her knees up to her chest, and floated there for what seemed to her like hours.

Despite all of her feelings to the contrary, staying out here was never really an option. Even though it seemed hopeless, she was going to find a way to get to her brothers - and get to them in time. There was always a way, always, and it was just up to her to find it. But what could the way be?

"I've tried to go to my future self, and failed miserably. I could try my past self, I suppose, but I doubt that would work. My past self has only the knowledge and skills I have, minus some. Doofenshmirtz doesn't have the Do-Over-Inator anymore, and doesn't want to rebuild it." She waved her hand through the collection of water droplets floating in the air, scattering them everywhere like mist. Okay, so there were two more options she could try. One option was to try going to 150 Walker Street again, and seeing just what L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N. was all about. The second was to take the time machine into the past, and find the Do-Over-Inator there, and bring it with her to the present. Wait - that wouldn't work. The Do-Over-Inator was deeply intertwined with space-time, and would very likely have become quantum-rooted, unable to travel through time at any rate other than one second every second. So, it seemed L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N. was the only choice. She still didn't even know what it stood for, or what it was. All she knew was that Phineas and Ferb had directed her away from it, but they had pointed her to Doofenshmirtz, who had ultimately been no help. Well, that was it then. There really seemed to be no other choice. She grabbed the pilot's seat and pulled herself down into it, fastening her body down with the seat belt.

With the flick of a switch, the rocket's engines flared up, sending vibrations through it's body. She pushed forwards on the joystick, gradually gaining speed, and leaving the moon and the skyscraper behind. It gradually disappeared behind her, first becoming a thick gray line, then a thin streak, before finally being swallowed by the blackness of outer space. The trip back to Earth seemed considerably longer than one away from it. Candace was no longer filled with excitement that she was almost there, almost to success. Instead, she growing upset that every. single. time. she reached anywhere even approaching successful, _something_ would pop up in her way. It was no wonder Phineas and Ferb were practically joined at the hip - having a second voice, a second opinion around, or even just another person to talk to, would have made the whole process so much easier. But, of course, there was no one in the universe she could go to. Her grasp on the joystick subconsciously tightened until her knuckles turned white.

"Maybe I should abandon this universe entirely, and travel to the next," she said to herself. But even that wouldn't have helped. The space-time continuum envelops all that exists, has existed, and ever will exist. Both in this dimension, and the next. And the next and the next and the next.

Truly, even in the grand scheme of the multiverse, Candace Flynn was very much alone.

Zipping through space at two million miles per hour, the rocket quickly traversed the half-million miles from the end of the skyscraper to the Earth. It plunged into the upper layers of the atmosphere with a vengeance. Huge orange tongues of flame leaped up around the nose of the rocket, cutting off any chance of communication with the outside world, and obscuring the view out the windshield with a wall of fire. The rocket was shaking violently as it dove deeper and deeper into the atmosphere. Feet braced against the floor, she pulled back on the stick with all her might. With a loud banging noise, three red-and-white parachutes exploded out of the tail end of the spacecraft, expanding to full capacity in an instant, held rigid by the wind. The combined force of the chutes, and her steering acted to ever-so-gradually slow the ship down. Sonic shock waves reverberated through the air, jostling buildings and causing ripples in the Danville Metropolitan Ovular Access Trench. By the time it was low enough to begin slicing through cloud banks over Danville, it was traveling a mere sixty miles an hour. With the press of a button, the braking parachutes were disconnected, and went fluttering to the ground. Steering lower and lower until she could discern between individual roads, Candace located Finnegan Street and followed it through town to Arbor Estates, no doubt shocking a number of drivers at the sight of a brightly colored rocket ship flying just forty feet off the ground.

Carefully pulling the ship back into a vertical position, she gently sat it down in the backyard, the noise of the engines shaking the neighborhood and the heat of the engine exhaust scorching the grass in a wide circle. When she removed the key from the ignition, the noise grumbled to a stop. For a few seconds, echoes lingered in the air, but before long they faded as well, and the only sound that could be heard was the rustling of the trees in the breeze and occasional bird calls. She stood up, and opened the airlock. The doors hissed as they slid back, letting a cloud of dense mist pour out into the air. Then she plopped down, legs dangling out the door, head in her hands, dejectedly wondering if she'd ever succeed. The urge to give up was strong, but she was stronger. She stood up and stripped out of her space suit, leaving it in a pile on the rocket's floor. Sliding down the outside of the rocket, she caught her balance and stood on the ground next to it.

"That's pretty impressive. How exactly does it work?" A high, squeaky voice cut through the otherwise silent yard. Candace turned questioningly in its direction. A bald-headed pharmacist was leaning on the wooden fence that went around the yard.

"Uh... do I know you?"

"Nope." The pharmacist shook his head. "But I know you, Candace Gertrude Flynn."

Candace frowned. "How do you know my name?"

The man raised a black-gloved hand to his face and inspected it closely. "Oh, you know, medical records, and all such as that." He reached into his pocket and tossed a bundle of papers across the yard to her. She knelt down and scooped them up, glancing at the cover page.

_Danville Memorial Hospital_  
_09/22/17_  
_4532 Memorial Hospital Lane, Danville. 555-342-4211_  
_Patient Information -_  
_Name: Candace Gertrude Flynn_  
_Address: 820 Maple Drive_  
_Patient ID: 5038-03724_  
_Birth Date: 06/11/02 (minor)_  
_Gender: Female_  
_SSN:395-583-6936_  
_Current medication(s): none_  
_Pre-existing condition(s): Class E hereditary thrombocytopenia_  
_Notes: mildly allergic to dairy products, extremely allergic to_ _furocoumarins_  
_Parent/Guardian Information -_  
_Name: Linda Flynn-Fletcher_  
_(continued on next page)_

Her eyes widened slightly as she ran them over the paper. Looking back up the man, she asked, "Aren't these supposed to be, you know, private?"

Well, generally yes," he answered somewhat condescendingly. "But a firewall can only do so much to keep out the truly determined."

"So you _hacked_ into my private information? For what? Who are you, anyway?"

He grinned and rubbed his hands together. "Well, because I think you and I could get along pretty well. And because I'm evil." The admission was so straightforward, and said with such a perfectly passive voice that it was slightly surprising.

"You're evil? Like, _evil_ evil? Aren't you a pharmacist?"

"Yes, yes, you know the cliches. Hand wringing, cackling laughter, monologues, all the stuff like that. And no, I'm not a pharmacist. I'm a scientist - an _evil_ scientist."

"So you tracked me down, purely because you're evil? Is this some kind of evil thing to creep me out? Because it's kind of working."

"Not entirely. You see, just this afternoon I left my van alone on the street. I had some ... evil ... to do, but when I returned, my van wasn't the same as when I had arrived." Candace had already realized where this was going.

"Oh. Uh, yeah... sorry about that. It's - it's not exactly something I can help."

"Oh, no, girl. I'm not mad. Far from it. The new engine is great - wonderful. And that's why I hunted you down. Because I think we can come to a little deal."

"A deal?"

"Yes, yes. I want you to make me more things for me, in the fashion you made my van. I'm sure there'll be some way I can convince to you agree, after all, _everyone_ has a price."

"But won't you use it for... evil?"

"But of course. But don't let that bother you. You just make it, and get your payment. Leave the evil to me."

That word popped to the forefront of Candace's thoughts. _Payment_. Could this be the way she got the supplies she needed? This ... deal? It was not a little offensive to her sense of morality, but she had reached a point of desperation so low that she was willing to consider it.

"What kind of payment?" she hesitantly asked, looking around as she did so, almost certain that somewhere, was a camera waiting to bust her in this potential deal with this self-proclaimed 'evil' scientist. The man's face twisted into a unsettling smile. A deep-rooted uneasiness began settling over her.

"Why don't you tell me what you want?" he said, "And I'm sure we can work out an even trade."

"Do - do you have a - a particle re-ionization matrix? And an electron nullification tube? And a quark quantum adjudicator? A-among other things." The man reached into his pocket and produced a particle re-ionization matrix, tossing the small metal gadget up and down in his hand. Candace could feel herself practically salivating over the part in his hand.

"How about you take this now, as symbol of my goodwill," the man said, suddenly tossing it through the air at her. She lurched forwards to catch it before it hit the ground. The cold metal felt warm in her palm, as it represented a good chunk of progress towards the more expensive and elusive things she needed. The man continued talking. "I'll give you tonight to think over it. I'll be back in the morning to see what you've decided. I just hope you make the right choice. I'm a nice guy, really I am. Don't make me into something else."

The not-so-subtle threat echoed and re-echoed in her mind as she watched him turn and walk away. But the cool weight of the matrix in her hand was a powerful argument to go along with his plan.

"Hey!" Candace shouted after him, "What's your name?" He stopped.

"I'm Aloyse Everheart Elizabeth Otto Wolfgang Hypatia Gunther Galen Gary Cooper von Roddenstein."

"What?"

"I said, I'm Aloyse Ever-"

"Never mind, I got it." she interrupted him as he started to repeat his mile-long name.

"Good. I think I'll be seeing you around."

She watched as he walked down the driveway down to the street, got into his van, and drove off down the street. As the van turned left at the end of Maple Drive, it passed a car that Candace recognized as the Garcia-Shapiro's car, which was coming closer. As it drew near, she recognized her parents sitting in the car, frantically motioning at her. This wasn't going to be fun. Then a thought dawned on her. There _was_ a way to get rid of the rocket ship before her parents saw it again. It wouldn't completely solve all of her problems, but it would make some of them easier to explain. Stuffing the matrix and her medical records into her pockets, she took a deep breath. She had to get this right - it hadn't really worked all that well since Phineas and Ferb's disappearance, but hopefully a return to her old habits could jar the universe into action. Cracking her fingers, she broke into a sprint and dashed out into the street in front of the car.

"Mooooooooooom! Moooooooooom!" she shouted at the top of her lungs. Ear-splitting squealing pealed through the air as Mrs. Garcia-Shapiro hastily slammed on the brakes. The tires smoked, and the car swerved violently to a stop inches before flattening her. Candace ran around to the passenger side door and yanked it open.

"Mom! You have to come and see what I did! It's enormous!" she yelled over the protests of the car's passengers, not stopping to take a breath or let any of them get a word in edgewise. Grabbing ahold of Linda's wrist, Candace forcibly yanked her out of the car, and began pulling her the short distance to the backyard. This had to work. It had to.

Just as they rounded the corner of the house, a tremendous clatter could be heard. Candace kicked open the wooden fence gate, revealing ... an empty backyard. _Yes_. She barely resisted the urge to fist pump. Time to really sell it.

"Nooo!" she wailed, dramatically dropping to her knees and looking up to the sky."It was right here, I swear it!" Okay, it was a little over-dramatic, but she had to make absolutely sure that the Mysterious Force wasn't going to renege on her the way it did the night of her ~~party~~ intimate get-together.

"Are you talking about the -the rocket?" her mother asked.

"What? What rocket? No, there was ... a roller coaster. To the moon! That I built! Yes!" The idea did sound attractive, and she mentally filed it away for another time.

Linda Flynn-Fletcher's eyes narrowed. "Aren't you a little young to be a roller coaster engineer?"

"Well, yes. Yes I am."

"So then where is the rocket?"

"What rocket?" This was going to be the hardest part of the exchange - convincing her parents that they had merely been seeing things when they had witnessed her launch. Of course, the fact that the red station wagon was missing would make it that much harder. Also the scorched spot on the driveway. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that this was going to be impossible. Suddenly her eyes lit up. Of course! It was _impossible_. And who better to make the impossible possible than her, the sister of Phineas Flynn and Ferb Fletcher?

Candace felt the particle matrix in her pocket. She'd wanted to save it for the space-time ripper, but right now she was going to use for something else.

"Hang on!" she told her mother, and father, who had walked out into the yard to join them. She sprinted around the house to the garage. Pushing the door open, she looked around. Paint cans, piles of newspapers, old flowerpots, and metal trashcans were stacked up in the back. Time to get busy - and quickly. Her parents wouldn't wait too much longer. Scooping up a armful of rusty tools that had been thrown on a shelf, she set to work. Using only bare hands and rusty manual tools, she somehow managed to screw, and hammer, and weld, and solder, and program, until sitting the middle of the garage was a perfect replica of the station wagon. It had been made of trashcans and and parts of a lawnmower and two bicycles and a single tricycle. And most importantly, it worked!

She had also thrown together a miniature amnesia-induction ray. When her parents were drawn by the noises of her project, with the press of a button and a flash of light, all memory of certain red rocket was instantly scrubbed from their recollection. A bucket of paint served as a quick cover for the huge scorched patch on the driveway. Turning the burnt grass circle in the backyard over with a shovel left only an irregularly shaped patch of dirt in yard. By the time Candace was finished covering up the traces she had left behind, the sun was already beginning to slide behind the horizon. As she went to put the shovel back in the garage, a huge yawn forced its way out of her system. Even though it was only a few minutes past six o'clock, the sleepless nights of the past two days were rapidly catching up with her as her body insisted she make up for lost time.

When her mother called her in for dinner, it was all she could do to keep her eyes open at the table. Using the stress of the start of school tomorrow as an excuse, she quickly finished her plate of spaghetti and retired to her bedroom a good few hours earlier than normal. School _was_ going to be an issue - it obviously started tomorrow, Monday, ready to demand a huge chunk of her waking hours. But she didn't have any time to give. She needed to devote her time to getting the necessary ingredients for a space-time ripper. The particle matrix was a great step in that direction, but was still just a single step.

If she wanted to get more supplies out of the bald-headed 'evil scientist' then she'd need to trade him something worthwhile. The thinly-veiled threat he had tossed over his shoulder as he had left was not lost on her either. She shuddered slightly while changing to her pajamas. Would he really be willing to put any actual force behind his words? He had already somehow tracked her down by hacking into medical records which indicated he was at least unscrupulous, if nothing else. Even if he couldn't or wouldn't back up his words, did she really want to deal with someone who would make threats like that? Of course she didn't _want_ to, it was just a question of _how badly_ she didn't want to. Pulling back the comforter, she collapsed onto her mattress. These things would just have to wait till tomorrow. Exhaustion took over, and mercifully, sleep came almost as soon her head hit the pillow.

* * *

"Candace! Candace, honey, wake up! You don't to be late for the first day of school!"

"Mmmuhh...?" Candace blearily forced her eyes open to the insistence of her mother.

"I'm up. I'm up. Give me just a second to get ready."

"Alright, but if you aren't downstairs in ten minutes, I'm coming back up to get you."

When the door shut behind her mother, she drowsily sat up in bed and looked at the clock. It was 6:15 AM, on Monday morning - the first day of school. As the fog of sleep was gradually shaken loose of her brain, an all-to-familiar itch began poking at the back of her head, a constant reminder that world was not the same as it had been just one short week ago. Sticking one foot out of bed, she pulled herself to the edge, and scooped up her phone off her nightstand, checking for any missed texts, something she hadn't done for almost twenty four hours now - easily the longest she had ever gone without doing so.

_Stacy ( 5:45 PM Yesterday):_  
_Why haven't you texted or called me? Are you dead? What's going on? I need to know these things!_

_Jeremy ( 9:57 PM Yesterday):_  
_Guess you were busy all day. :( I'll see you at school tomorrow. Goodnight._

_Unknown number ( 3:12 AM Today)_  
_Remember that I'm expecting an answer today. You can't hide from me. Don't disappoint me._

For most part, they were entirely normal texts, signifying normal people attempting to go about their normal lives, completely unaware of the new craziness in her life. The last one, of course, was a reminder of it instead. It sounded scarily similar to a mafia movie she had seen not too long ago - only then she had laughed its cheesiness. There were no laughs now. Putting her phone down, she slowly changed from pajamas into her regular clothes. So what now? Just go to school? That wasn't really a good idea, even if she hadn't turned all of her school supplies into a giant paper Eiffel Tower, which still stood in her room. How could she waste six hours in school, when Phineas and Ferb might not even be able to hang on that much longer. It had been four days since their disappearance, which was beginning to push the boundaries of how long a person can sustain themselves without water, much to her dismay.

So her mind was made up then - school was out. There was no way she was going to sit around in a classroom for hours on end, when each passing hour put her brother's lives in greater and greater danger. She'd have to ride to school like normal, then wait for her mother to drive away, then duck away herself, going off to find the things she needed for a space-time ripper. Of course, doing that would most likely drive her deeper into association with that creepy scientist with the really long name, but could that be helped? Not in the ever-shortening time frame she had.

Scooping up her empty backpack, she slung it across her back and headed downstairs. Her mother looked up from a book.

"You ready to go?"

"Yup."

"You sure you have everything you need?"

"Yup."

"Alright then, let's get a move on. Traffic's probably gonna be bad around the school today."

The two of them left the house and got in the car. For a single heart-stopping moment, her mother's key seemed to not want to start the replacement she had built yesterday evening. Then something clicked, and the engine started. The fifteen minute ride to school was a mostly silent one. Candace had once again opted to not answer most of the texts she had received, not wanting to have to explain herself to her old friends. One she did answer however - the one from the unknown number.

_I've made up my mind. Where do you want to meet?_

_Won't your house do just fine?_

_No, school starts today and I'm supposed to be there._

_Ah. Meet me at 148 Walker Street. Warehouse 12A._

_You've got tools and stuff?_

_I've got everything. You just bring you._

_K._

When no response came after a few minutes, she slid her phone into her pocket and returned to looking straight out the windshield as her mother drove.

"Nervous?" her mother asked, as an attempt to break the silence.

"Yeah." She was nervous, all right, but not about school. The itch behind her head had steadily increased in intensity since waking up, and she was about run off for a meeting with some weird bald guy. It was enough to make anyone nervous, but she knew there was no other choice.

She put fake smile and waved as her mother dropped her off outside Danville High School. Her heart sank as her mother pulled straight back out onto the main street, instead of driving along the double-wide parking lot to John P. Tristate Elementary to drop off her two brothers. She stood still, watching the red vehicle drive away, until it was no longer perceptible. Glancing over her shoulder to ensure no one was paying attention to her in the hubbub of 'first school day', she quietly slipped away from the school, quietly cutting a path away opposite to the group of kids walking to school. She made it to the city bus stop just down the street, and when the bus pulled up, she slid inside, and found a seat near the back. Once everyone else was off, the driver shut the door, and pulled away, taking Candace with him, leaving the high school behind. By skipping out on school (on the first day, no less), she knew she was taking matters up to a head. It wouldn't be long before her parents were asked by the school why their daughter hadn't filed for an absence form, and they would realize that she had run off. She had better get the stuff she needed for the ripper today, or it would become a _lot_ harder to do so.

She sat quietly on the backseat of the bus as it made its rounds around town. Although the few other people who boarded the bus at the various stops no doubt couldn't have cared less about who she was or where she was going, it still felt as if their eyes were burning into her, as if they all knew what she was about to do. The feeling of being watched built up inside her, to the point where she had a sharp intake of breath and gave a tiny jump when a man asked her if she could give back the pen he had dropped under her seat by mistake. When the bus finally reached the stop on Rally Street, just two streets south of Walker Street, she shot out of it like a bird out of a cage. If yesterday's visit to the northernmost parts of Danville had been any indication, it was likely that there wouldn't be another soul in her path until she reached her destination.

But yesterday had been Sunday, and today was Monday. The previously abandoned streets were teeming with life, as people rushed to and fro, wearing hard hats, and carrying lunch boxes. Tractor trailers with various company logos were parked in streets, in the middle of being loaded or unloaded. Shrill beeps blared through the air, as a handful of forklifts moved large pallets of boxes into and out of the warehouses. Candace slowly edged her way through the crowds of workers, gradually cutting a path to her destination.

At last, she reached it -148 Walker Street. Looking up at the large corrugated iron front of the warehouse that marked that address, she read the sign posted on it. **Hidden Rising Tower Warehouse Inc.** Unlike the other buildings in the industrial district, the large sliding doors on this one were still closed, and no signs of life could be seen around it. Walking up to the sliding door, she grabbed ahold of the handle, and with a great effort, slid one of the doors back just four feet. Early morning sunlight streamed into the warehouse, lighting on a bare concrete floor.

"Hello?" she called into the cavernous empty space.

"Come in." said the squeaky voice of the so-called evil scientist. Swallowing her nervousness, she stepped into the warehouse. All her common sense screamed out at her to recognize the sheer stupidity of her actions. But desperation has a way of quashing things like that.

"And shut the door behind you." She grabbed the door she had just recently opened, and painstakingly slid it shut again, cutting off the rays of sunlight illuminating the area. Almost as soon as the doors were shut, however, an electrical buzzing arced through the air, and dim yellow light bulbs mounted in the roof flickered once, twice, thrice, and then came on, with a quiet humming. The light revealed that the warehouse space wasn't as empty as it had appeared. Large metal tables were set up at the other end, filled with various mechanical contraptions and parts. Tools littered the floor, and a massive stack of blue papers that was at least three feet tall sat next to them. A huge computer monitor with a blank screen was set up on one table.

"You like it?" said the scientist, motioning with his arms to the place. "It's my laboratory. This is where my evil is born." Her face must have reflected how she felt to some degree, because he took one look at her and cut himself short.

"Come on over here and make something for me," he said, "And if it's good enough, you can make something for yourself as well - of course, on the condition you make it here."

"Make it here?" she echoed. This was a new thing. Having to make the space-time ripper _here_ would make it kind of awkward to explain to Phineas and Ferb when she pulled them out.

"But of course! I may be nice, but I'm not stupid. And I don't intend for you to run off with my stuff before I see just what you're going to do with it."

"Uhh..." Candace drawled. "Okay, I guess." What choice did she have? Sliding the empty backpack off her shoulders onto the ground, she walked over to the piles of supplies and materials lying on the tables.

"So... what are you gonna make?" he asked. She closed her eyes and tried to picture something that used the things on the tables. Something that would sufficiently impress the evil scientist, so he would agree to give her the things she needed. But what would work? Suddenly, an idea came. Grabbing ahold of the tools, she rapidly began assembling the assorted parts on the tables into a completed object. The scientist watched her intently as her project took shape underneath her hands. Just a few minutes later, she was done. Sitting on the table before them was a small silver remote, with a handful of colorful buttons on it.

"And what does that do?"

"It's a quantum scrambler," she answered. To demonstrate, she picked it up and pressed the largest button. A blue aura of light appeared around her, and she stuck her arm through the table. _Through_ the table.

"Nifty." the scientist said, watching her move effortlessly through the solid object. "And how do you not fall through the floor?"

"Uh, there's a super-intelligent built-in AI that actively scans the surrounding objects to determine what should become transparent, and what should remain solid." She pressed the button on the remote again, and the blue light disappeared. Moving her hand towards the table, her knuckles rapped against the surface like normal.

"Is it... good enough?" she asked, handing off the device. He activated it himself and spent a few moments testing it out, walking back and forth through the computer monitor, and through her, an action which sent shivers up and down her spine. The human body was not meant to be walked through. Disabling the device, he sat it down on the table.

"I'll accept it for now. Why don't you make your little thing, and we'll go from there."

Turning back to the table, she ran her eyes over the remaining supplies.

Pizzazium Infinionite?

_Check_.

Particle Matrix?

_Check_.

Electrical Flux Protarizer?

_Check._

Holographic Resonance Wave Inducer?

_Check._

Everything was here.

At long last, she had _everything_. Picking up the tools again, she sat to work. Grabbing ahold of a welding helmet and snapping it on, she lowered the face mask. Metal was melted together, wires were strung, chips were infused, and processors were programmed. The light of the bulbs glinted off the machine taking shape, bundled wires hanging loosely on the concrete, and it's large cone-shaped tip pointed up in the air. A screen embedded in one side of it was filled with static, with occasional flashes of blue. She fiddled with some wiring in the underside of the ripper, and the static cleared up, the screen showing a terminal awaiting command. Sparks began arcing around the tip of the machine as she drew closer to completion.

Ten minutes later, she tightened the last bolt on the last panel of the device. Taking a single step back, her mind was filled with one thought and one thought only: _I hope this works_. Everything else - her surroundings, her questionable companion, and the shady way she had gotten ahold of the materials was forgotten.

Going around to the screen on the side, she flipped a red switch to begin the internal processes that would allow this contraption to tear a hole in the very fabric of reality itself. Electrical buzzing filled the air. A row of lights along its length flickered on, flashing first red, then yellow, then green. The needle on a dial began jumping around wildly. Bracing herself for the worst, Candace reached forwards and firmly pressed a large green button on it. The humming grew to greater intensity, pitch rising higher and higher until it became a shrill whine. The machine shook and trembled violently. It was shaking so much that it almost seemed to rise up off the ground. Then, the tip began to glow. Dimly at first, it grew brighter and brighter until the entire warehouse was lit up like a bonfire, drowning out the electric lights in its intensity. Candace turned away, unable to look, for the sheer luminosity. A loud shrieky wail ripped through air, grating painfully on her ears. But, although she was both blinded and deafened by her creation, her heart was rejoicing, because she knew it was _working_. A horrible wailing rang through the air, and a beam of light, so pure and strong that it would have made the sun look like a candle, shot from the tip of machine, stopping in mid-air as if it had hit a wall. A brilliant orb swelled at the end of the beam, growing larger and larger as more power was fed into it. The orb tore in the center, reshaping into what was more reminiscent of a doughnut. The hole in the middle was pitch blackness - a blackness completely undisturbed by the intense light scouring everything else . Small flecks of gray began appearing the black, growing larger and more common as time passed.

Then it was over. The light faded, then went completely out. The howling ceased. The constant shaking and rattling of the machine calmed. But there, in the center of the warehouse, stood open a portal to the unknown, a rift to a place beyond space and time. The only thing that Candace could see through it was a thick gray mist, which seemed to go on forever. But she had done it. She had really and truly _done it_ _!_ She had torn a hole in reality to save her brothers. Well, they weren't saved yet. She still had one more thing to do - go in and find them.

She stopped for a brief moment to glance back at the scientist. His eyes were wide, and his mouth was hanging open. For a second, he stood still, not even breathing as he stared into the temporal rift she had forced open. He blinked several times, as if trying to convince himself that what he saw was indeed real.

"I - I - say." he managed after a bit. "That's quite the achievement there. Where does the portal go?"

"Beyond existence." she answered shortly, looking around for some sort of rope or ladder to throw down through the hole.

"And what is... beyond existence, as you say?"

"Nothing - it's beyond _everything_. Outside of everything. It's like - kinda indescribable. Probably like some sort of endless void where you just float around forever or something." Honestly, she really had no idea what the topography of the place was like - just that her brothers shouldn't be there.

"You don't say." The tone in his voice took a dramatic shift, so much so that she whipped around her head to look at his face. The same unsettling looking smile from yesterday had resurfaced across his features, and he was wringing his hands again.

"Uh, yeah. At least I think so." Her eyes lighted on a thick coil of rope lying on the floor. Perfect. Grabbing it up, she glanced around for something firm and immovable to attach the one end to. Kicking the leg of one of the tables, it did a small jump, and jerked to the side, showing that it would not be suitable for anchoring.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm gonna go inside of it." she replied.

"Why? I thought there was nothing there."

"Well, there isn't, but I just want to see what it's like - for science."

"Ah. For science. And there's no way out from the inside?"

"Not that I know of." If there had been a way out from inside, surely Phineas and Ferb would have found it by now. The mere fact that they hadn't must mean there was no way.

"Hmmph." A moment of silence passed in the warehouse as she looked around for anything sufficiently solid to bear the weight of the rope.

"You know, I can hold the end of the rope for you."

"What? Really?"

"Sure. Just tie the end to the table, and that plus me will easily be able to handle your weight."

Candace momentarily wondered what game the man was up to. As if reading her thoughts, he suddenly said, "There's no game here. I told you yesterday: I'm a nice guy. Really I am."

"You also said you were evil." she pointed out.

"Well, that's true, and I am, but there's a difference between _good_ evil and _bad_ evil. See, _bad_ evil is like rob-a-bank and kick-a-puppy, while _real_ evil is more along the lines of turn-an-entire-neighborhood's-worth-of-houses-into-paper-during-a-rainstorm and world-subjugation. Things like that."

Candace was still slightly unsure of where exactly the line was that he had supposedly drawn, but her sense of urgency drove her to accept his offer anyway. She was so close now, with a literal rift open not ten feet away, that she couldn't bear to wait any longer. So she securely tied one end of the rope to a leg of the table, and passed the rope to the scientist.

"You got it?" she asked, tossing the rest of the coil into the portal. He nodded.

She stuck her hand into the rift, feeling the mist. It was surprisingly gritty sensation, like mist without any actual moisture. Gingerly sticking one leg through, she felt about for a solid surface to stand on, but found none. Time to trust the rope. Grabbing ahold of it, she ever-so-slowly transferred her weight onto it. The scientist braced his feet against the pull, and held steady. Stopping for just a moment, before fully entering the rift, she took a deep breath, then in a single fluid motion, shifted the full amount of her weight onto the rope. It immediately stretched taut, and she slowly inched her way downwards through the mist.

* * *

 

All seemed to be going well, for about two minutes. As usual, Aloyse Everheart Elizabeth Otto Wolfgang Hypatia Gunther Galen Gary Cooper von Roddenstein had something up his sleeve. When Doofenshmirtz had left L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N. - claiming some nonsense bunk about ' _more important things in life_ ', he had slowly tried to worm his way back into the organization of evildoers. It had been hard - after the whole failed attempt to take over the world by moving it away from the sun, he had been thoroughly disowned and rejected by the other scientists. For a while he had moped about in OWCA's maximum-security prison, but eventually had had enough of  _that_ and decided to get back into his old life. A cleverly engineered prison break involving coat hangers and toothpaste was enough to escape, and he had tried to get back in with the group, starting with his best friend among them, Dr. Bloodpudding.

But even the good doctor had wanted nothing to do with him at first. After a while, however, Aloyse had worn him down, to the point where Bloodpudding had promised him his old position on the board if, and only if, he could successfully execute some truly evil plan. It seemed a generous enough proposition, but was still a huge barrier to his re-entry. Aloyse's best invention to date had been the Fog-Clear-Away-Inator, which, while still a marvelous piece of technology that cleared away fog like no other, didn't have that many truly evil applications.

No, what he did best was people: manipulating them, and more importantly, stealing their ideas. For a long while he had done nothing, except lurk about L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N.'s main laboratory, hunting for that perfect idea to steal. But everyone was extremely wary of him, and they all hid their ideas away, never giving him an opportunity. It had seemed hopeless, until yesterday, when he had the good luck to see an orange-haired teenage girl tear apart his van, and build a teleportation system out of the scraps, then tear that apart and put the van back together, albeit with a modified engine. It was great stroke of luck - here was the perfect target for him to put his most dastardly skills to use. A little bit of DNA analysis, followed by a bit of hacking, had enabled him to track the girl down. Once he found where she lived, it really was all over for her. A few well-executed power plays, and _voila_! It was almost too easy.

The quantum scrambler she had given him had been amazing - it would open so many opportunities for evil. But there had been a loose end: her. It wouldn't do to have someone like her reporting him to any form of law enforcement agency if she ever called his bluffing. For a while he had debated with himself the best way to get rid of that chance. Memory wipe? Brainwashing? Kidnapping? Sealed in a rocket and sent off into deep space? Straight-up killing? There were plenty of options, but they all had various degrees of risk to them. But here, now, a new alternative presented itself to him, a completely safe method of completely avoiding any future repercussions. The girl had torn a rift open in space and time - something which he hadn't known was possible - and had left him literally holding her lifeline to reality. He chuckled to himself at the sheer naivety of people who were unlearned in the wiles of the world. Like any true evil scientist, however, he couldn't just up and do it without a bit of old-fashioned gloating.

Careful to not let go of the rope just yet, he reached into his lab coat pocket and produced a pocketknife, sawing off the part of the rope which was knotted to the table. A few extra pounds of weight that the knot had been helping hold caused him to lurch forwards a step.

"Is everything okay up there?" the girl asked, her voice filtering up strangely through the misty air beyond the rift.

"Wonderfully!" he exclaimed. "Say," he called back after a second, "Now wouldn't it be a shame if I suddenly got a blister on my hands?" He could barely hold back the evil laugh he felt building up in the pit of his stomach.

"What are you talking about?"

"Not much. Just - this!" and he dropped the rope to the floor of the lab, where it instantly snaked away into the rift.

"OHHHMYYYYGOOOOOooo..." the scream sliced through the air, loud at first, then rapidly diminished in volume as the girl tumbled down into the plane of non-existence, presumably to fall forever and ever. He could hold back the laugh no longer. Taking a deep breath and leaning back ...

"Mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha -gasp- hahahahahaha!"

At last out of breath, he glanced at his watch.

"Hmm. Forty-three seconds. Not bad at all." He walked over to the space-time rift opener and paused momentarily, unsure of how to disable it. Hefting up a hammer, he landed three solid blows directly on the screen screwed into the device. Sparks flew, and the rift flickered, and flashed, before snapping shut with a thunder-clap-like noise that shook the entire warehouse. Thick plumes of black smoke began pouring from the battered rifter. Grabbing up the quantum scrambler, he quickly made himself transparent, just as the machine violently exploded into a shower of fire and metal shards. He smiled to himself. Time to get back on top of the game.

* * *

Frozen with fear, Candace clutched to the loose rope as she plummeted downwards through the mist. The scream had long since died in her throat, as her entire body tried to shrink in on itself. With a sudden puff, she fell through the bottom of the mist bank, revealing solid ground just a short distance beneath her. Her eyes widened.

" _Please faint before you hit the ground. Please faint before you hit the ground. Please faint before_ -"

With a resounding THUMP, the falling girl met the unyielding ground. Pain raced up and down her limbs. Her vision glazed over, and a strong scent flooded her nose.

"Is this what death smells like? Baked beans?" she thought.

Then she fainted.


	7. The Land Beyond Time

"beep...beep...beep...beep..."

The cardiac monitor's persistent beeps wormed their way into Candace's mind, slowly dragging her from unconsciousness back to the land of the living. With a groan, she forced open her eyes, and took in her surroundings. It was a fairly ordinary hospital room, as hospital rooms go. The bed was pressed against one side of the room, facing a bland cream-colored wall with a television set hanging near the ceiling. The lights and the television were all off, but a dim glow crept in around the edges of the curtains hanging over the window. A collection of computers and screens stood on one side of the bed, among which stood the cardiac monitor. A small nightstand was next to them, holding the pile of stuff she'd been collecting in her pockets over the past few days.

Looking down at herself, she saw her left arm wrapped up in a sling and cast, resting gently across the top of the bed sheets. A brief moment of panic crept into her mind as a dart of pain shot through her left side when she instinctively tried to extend her arm. Whatever had happened to it, it wasn't going anywhere. An I.V. tube fed into her right arm, providing a constant drip of some translucent yellow liquid. For a moment, she couldn't understand what had happened. Her memory told her that she had fallen into a space-time rift of her own creation, after having been stupid enough to trust that evil scientist with her rope. But that memory was severely at odds with the situation she now found herself. Had she somehow hallucinated everything, and only just now actually woken up from the accident at the museum?

Struggling into an upright position, she reached with her good arm to the small bedside table, and grabbed her phone.  
Waking it up, she glanced at the screen. It was Tuesday, 4:32 in the morning. All the texts between herself and the scientist were still there, sure as she was seeing them. So then were was she? Opening up her phone's modified GPS, the screen filled with static. **No signal**.

"No signal?" she thought. "...how?"

The modifications she had made to the GPS with Doofenshmirtz's screwdriver had allowed her phone to access the data from all GPS satellites, and pinpoint any location within a million miles of them to an accuracy of half a nanometer. How was there no signal? She had torn out the internet receiver while working on the phone, so the internet wouldn't work anyway. Instead, she opened the phone book, and chose a number at random. The outgoing call fizzled out immediately. **No service**.

"No service? In a hospital?"

Now, that was _really_ strange. Setting her phone down, she reached over and grabbed the T.V. remote. Pointing it at the T.V., she pressed the power button. After a moment, the screen came on. The channel was set to some news channel, only the studio was strangely empty. The news ticker running along the bottom of the screen was filled with unreadable gibberish.

" _ndaerb heterb orecastferb aysserb omorrowterb illwerb ikelylerb be a illionmerb ndaerb ixserb imesterb etterberb_."

Flipping away from the channel, she scrolled through several more - a cartoon show, a sports channel, a cooking show, a game show, and even an infomercial channel. But weirdly enough, though voices could be heard in the background of the shows, no living person could be seen on any of them. The voices were somewhat mechanical sounding, and none of them were intelligible - as if spoken by a gibberish-speaking robot.

Candace had once had a recurring nightmare like this, waking up in a strange world where she was the only person left after everyone else had mysteriously disappeared. Those dreams had stopping coming after she had gotten to around six years old, but that didn't help the feeling of dread welling up inside of her right now. Where was she? Was she alone? She could feel herself beginning to panic. The cardiac monitor reflected the feeling, with the beeping coming louder and more rapidly, and the line on the screen spiking to new heights. She had to get up. Propping herself on her good arm, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. The I.V. tube tugged insistently on her, denying her any further progress. Just as she was debating the prudence of tearing it out, her eyes laid on a red button on the side of the bed. The emergency call button. If anyone else was here in this nightmare hospital, the button would bring them running. Slamming her hand down on the button, she sat still for a moment and listened. She heard the intercom in the hall speak up in a loud automated voice.

"Patient assistance required in room one. Patient assistance required in room one."

There was a small commotion on the other side of the door. The knob turned, and who should run in, but _Phineas Flynn_. Candace felt her mouth drop open. His eyes lit up as he hurriedly entered the room, setting down his glass of orange juice down on the nightstand.

"Candace! You're awake! That's awesome! You feeling okay?"

For a long moment, she could do nothing but stare. Phineas watched the shell-shocked reaction with a kind of good-humored amusement.

"Phineas? How? What? But-"

Then it didn't matter anymore. She dazedly made a motion for him to come closer. He came near, and she grabbed him with her good arm and held him close. Here he was, after all that struggle. He was just fine, it seemed, even if he was a rather unusually pasty pale at the moment. But other than his whitened complexion, he seemed to be completely fine, and none the worse for having spent almost five days on the outside of existence. For a brief moment, all the craziness of the past few days melted away. She blinked rapidly and willed away the tears that threatened to spill. Only one tiny one managed to leak out, dampening a small streak down the back of Phineas's shirt. This moment could last forever, for all she cared. Silence reigned supreme over the small room, broken only by the medical monitors.

"Aw, thanks, sis. I missed you too!" He returned the embrace. The sound of his voice broke the spell in the room, snapping her out of her previous state of mind, and starting it down a more logical path. The more she tried to understand what had gone on, the more her her mind overflowed with confusion. What had happened after she had fallen through the rift? There was a hospital on the other side? There shouldn't been anything on the other side except Phineas and Ferb and whatever had fallen through... oh.

"Phineas?" she asked, not letting up her grasp even slightly. "Did _you_ build this hospital?"

"Yeah!" he replied brightly, starting to squirm underneath her grip. "Do you like it? It's just like a regular hospital, except, you know, with just the one room. Ferb built it yesterday while I patched you up after we found you. You're awfully lucky that you landed on our mountain of beans. If you'd actually hit the ground, you'd probably be a lot worse off than just a broken arm."

_Ferb_. "Where's Ferb now?"

"He's asleep. We took turns staying up so that you wouldn't be alone when you woke up. Not for long, at least." Phineas at last succeeded in wiggling free of her arm. Picking up his cup of orange juice, he drained the entire glass in three gulps and sat the cup back down on the table with a satisfied sigh.

"When do you think he'll be awake? I really, really want to see him."

Phineas frowned briefly. It wasn't really a frown per say, but anything that wasn't a smile was so alien to his face that it might well have been one. "I'm not particularly sure. It won't be to much longer, like three hours or so."

She wanted to see him so incredibly bad, and yet, something inside her stirred and wanted to let him sleep. Maybe since the urgency of the situation had been dissipated, it was her old sibling instincts telling her that she could just as easily wait another few hours to see him, so as not to disturb him in his sleep. Unsure of what to say next, she just stared at Phineas.

"How have you been?" he asked.

She'd been pretty bad, if she was being honest. The four days leading up to this point had been some of the worst days of her life. But she didn't want worry her little brother, so she decided to change the subject.

"You said I landed on a mountain of beans? Did you make that too? Why?"

"For skiing! It's great fun."

"You do know what happened to you, don't you?"

It was a silly thing, to think that he might somehow have not realized not realized that he had fallen through a space-time rift. She didn't really know what she had expected to see - but Phineas seemed completely unfazed by it. She watched his face intently as she asked, and saw, for the briefest of seconds, a flash of something other than cheerfulness dart across his face. Then it was gone, and the happiness was back.

"Well, of course! Ferb and I - and you too, now - fell through a rift in the unstable time loop you told us about. Now we are outside the space-time continuum, and according to our observations, the unstable time loop resolved itself." He paused. "How did you get here? Did you find a stray rift that stayed open after the loops ceased, or what?"

"I, uh, no." She paused awkwardly. Why was it so hard to just up and say what she had done? If there was anyone in her life who would instantly accept her new creative instincts, it would be Phineas and Ferb. " I, uh, made the rift." There, it was out. That wasn't so bad, was it? For a second, Phineas talked on as if he hadn't fully grasped what she had said.

"That's awesome! So, you feel any pain in your..." his voice trailed off, and he turned his eyes back to her face. "You _made_ it?" he asked incredulously. Drawing back just a smidgen, she answered.

"Yeah."

He looked at the floor for second, then looked back up, his smile so wide that it almost split his head in two.

"That's so _awesome_! What was it like? It was great, I know. Don't you love it? Ah, it's just so nice, like a - a blanket or something."

"Uh huh." Candace replied uncertainly. He was so happy for her, she really didn't want to spoil it for him by saying that _no_ , it wasn't great, and she didn't necessarily love it.

"I can't believe that you could do it! That's so great. We can do so much cool stuff now! This place will be even better than Ferb and I have already made it. It'll be like the -"

"What _have_ you made?" she asked, interrupting. He cut himself off and flashed another wide smile.

"Just turn around and see." he said motioning to the curtained window. He walked around the bed, and with dramatic flourish, pressed a button on the wall to retract them, flooding the room with light and affording her an excellent view beyond the small room. If she had still been wearing her socks and shoes in the bed, the view would have literally blown her socks off.

Instead of a flat, boring, gray plane; lush green grass coated the ground, sparsely dotted with trees. The trees were dwarfed by towering buildings, which were wrapped about with loop upon loop of roller coaster track. A huge water slide stood to the far left, connected to what was easily the biggest pool she had ever laid her eyes on. There was a launch pad, complete with all kinds of rocket ships, ranging from the more common upright variant to flying saucers, and several huge statues of various objects. In the middle of it all, rose the base of a gargantuan skyscraper, so wide and thick it put the moon skyscraper to shame.

"It's two trillion stories tall." Phineas said proudly, seeing her crane her neck in an attempt to see the point where the building disappeared into the omnipresent mist bank that always hovered about thirty feet above the ground. "We've just been adding floors to it whenever we feel like doing something, but don't know what. There's a teleportation matrix to access the various floors - there's a floor dedicated to almost everything imaginable. Even one for you!"

For a second she didn't know what to think. It was amazing; a multicolored paradise. With the limitations of budgets, space, time, parents, and the Mysterious Force lifted, her brothers had been able to flex their imagination to a degree that even she had not expected. Had they even stopped for a moment to realize that they had been wiped out of the universe, dumped into a dimension beyond reality, with no apparent way back?

"Have - have you figured out a way to get back?" She almost didn't want to ask the question. What if they had, but then decided to stay here anyway, where they could do whatever they wanted, without having to worry about school or city licensing or obnoxious older sisters who constantly got in their way?

"Ah, now there's the catch." Phineas said, turning away from the window to face her again. "In short, no. In long, however - not _yet_. We've tried a bunch of ideas, but don't worry! There's still plenty more where they came from! We'll get back eventually, you can be sure of that. It's definitely going to happen. For sure."

Candace tried to stand, and he quickly darted over to her bedside to move the IV bag onto a movable stand, so she could walk about freely.

"What's in that anyway?" she asked.

"Mostly water and salt, with some vitamins and stuff" he answered. "Helps ward off dehydration. Now that you're up, I could probably take it out, but we'll just let it finish this bag first, to be safe."

Grabbing the stand, she used the metal pole to help herself regain her sense of balance. Once confident in her ability to stand on her own two feet, she walked over to the window for a better view, wheeling the stand along behind her.

"It's amazing." she said.

"I know, right? It's the coolest place ever." There was a pause, and then he resumed. "Say, Candace, I wanted to ask you what happened at the museum?" His question took her aback.

"How do you know about that? Was it the way you sent me the note?"

"Note? What note? No, it's because you were toting around a copy of your medical records. When we found you, and I emptied your pockets, I found them. They were super helpful, because it meant we could skip some preliminary testing, but I was just wondering what happened."

"What do you mean, 'what note'?" she asked, ignoring the question. "Didn't you send me a note with Doofenshmirtz's address?"

Phineas wrinkled his forehead. "No, not that I know of. We haven't been able to open any sort of exit rift yet, and I don't even know who Doofenshmirtz is. Unless you mean the mayor?"

Candace studied the floor. "Then who sent me that?" she said aloud.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

She walked over to the table and picked the crumpled piece of paper up. Flattening it against the edge of the table, she gave it to Phineas. He quickly read it.

"I've never seen this before." he said, handing it back to her. "Maybe you weren't the only person standing outside the unstable time loop?"

That just didn't make any sense at all. Try as she might, she couldn't think of anyone who had acted as if they were outside the loop. And if someone was, why on earth would they pretend to not be? She could certainly have used the companionship, even if they weren't able to help.

"We can take the paper and do some residue stuff on it." Phineas offered, "It might help find out who wrote it. And it might not."

She waved him off. "No, it's fine, it's just weird." She'd deal with it another time. He shrugged.

"Sometimes, you just have good luck. Not everything needs a specific reason behind it, you know."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever." Candace was more than used to strange and inexplicable events occurring all around her, so this latest one was merely taken in stride. She looked down at the sling on her left arm. "So, what about this? What happened?"

"It was really a stroke of luck there too - when you fell, your left arm took the brunt of the fall, absorbing enough of the shock to protect your spine to a great degree. The bean mountain helped, too, but the way you landed was a huge part of it. Your arm broke in two places, but thankfully neither were very complex fractures - and they should heal back just fine."

"So, how long is it gonna be like this? Can't I - you - build some sort of machine to regrow it instantly?"

"Well of course we _could_ , but in general, it's better to let the body heal naturally."

"So how long will it take, then?"

"I'd say about six to eight weeks."

"Oh." Six to eight _weeks_? That was an insane amount of time to function with what was basically one arm. Candace supposed she should be thankful it wasn't worse. Hadn't Phineas said something about her spine?

"Speaking of building, what exactly did you build to make the rift?"

"Oh nothing. It was just a basic space-time ripper."

Phineas smiled. "I'm so glad you've gotten it again. We can have just so much fun now."

"Gotten it _again_? What does that mean?"

"Huh? Oh, nothing. Slip of the tongue, I guess. Say, lets go ride the roller coaster! There's great theme music for this place Ferb and I composed that will play as we ride."

Candace stared at him hard for second, and he smiled at her, reaching up to scratch behind his ear.

"Alright. Might as well."

"Awesome! Let's go."

The momentary break in his happy calmness had passed. But his words were not lost her. Gotten it _again_? Whatever did he mean by that? But she couldn't focus on it for long. The urge to build was beginning to resurface inside of her, after having lain dormant while she slept in the hospital bed, although it seemed much more muted than before. Even just looking at the crazy creations outside the window seemed to pacify it somewhat. Sitting back on the bed, she re-filled her pockets with the assorted junk she had been collecting. Grabbing her socks, she momentarily paused, unsure of how to proceed with only hand. Thankfully, Phineas picked up on her awkward pause and took the socks away from her.

"Let me do that" he said. "It's just like that baby picture of me that Mom has on that brown dresser."

She knew which one he was talking about - it was a grainy photo of a six-year-old version of herself trying her hardest to put a left shoe on hardly-three-years-old Phineas's right foot. If she was going to have to deal with this cast for a month and a half, eventually she'd need to figure out how to put her own socks on, but right now she might as well not bother.

Grabbing ahold of the I.V. rack, she rolled it along, as she followed Phineas out of the room. The room connected to a perfectly ordinary looking hospital hallway, with only two doors: the one back to the room, and one marked 'EXIT'. Phineas pushed it open, and immediately the illusion of the hospital was shattered. Brilliant artificial lights shone down from atop sparsely placed poles, feeling warm on the skin. Towering projects were scattered about on the soft green grass: a large computer-like object, an anti-grav device, a thirty-foot wide baseball and a huge pile of what appeared to be sand, among others. Funhouse style music played softly in the background and a food stand staffed by robots was placed next to the path between the hospital and the coaster entrance. The roller coaster track twisted and turned all over the place, with the track at one point abruptly disappearing, and then reappearing many feet away.

"Uh, Phineas" she asked, pointing to the huge gap in the track. "Is that hole supposed to be there? Is it a jump or...?"

"It's not even a hole" he answered. "The coaster moves in five dimensions. The track there is phase-shifted, and our three-dimensional minds cannot perceive it."

"Oh."

"It's great fun to ride on."

"I'm sure it is."

They walked past the base of the two-trillion-story skyscraper, which was about as wide at the base as one would expect of such a large building. About ten minutes later, they arrived at small booth next to which was a small sign: **The Coolest Coaster Ever! v3.0**

Underneath that, smaller text read: _Now with 100% more hyperspace!_

The roller coaster track ran right next to the booth, and there was a train of cars sitting on the track, waiting for their passengers. Standing back, Phineas helped her pick up the metal rack and set it into the front car. Then she climbed in and he followed. With the press of a red button in the coaster car, the safety rail lowered, and the train started moving. The track was level for just a few feet, then it arched upwards with frightening steepness. After a few minutes of riding almost straight up the track, the train at last reached the top, and paused for a second.

Turning to her, Phineas said, "This is where the real fun starts!" Music started playing from hidden speakers in the coaster cars. With a screech of metal, the train made over the top and began the long plunge downwards.

The coaster shot down the drop, through a loop, and upside down along a roll. It flew so quickly that it phase shifted into the 5th dimension of being and tore along the phase shifted track, shooting sparks in its wake. Loop-de-loops and barrel rolls, and drops and jumps, all taken a pace so great that everything around the car blurred together into a mass colorless blur. The track rounded a sharp curve and shot straight up in the air, directly along the wall of the two-trillion-story skyscraper. It swerved away, and once again dropped straight down, going so far and so fast that flames began licking up around the front of the car, reminiscent of atmosphere re-entry in a rocket. A few more loops, and a single long drop, and it was over, the cars slowly pulling up to the same booth where they had departed just minutes prior. Breathing heavily, Phineas turned to her once they came to stop.

"Wasn't that awesome!"

"Yeah, it was pretty great." Candace couldn't help but admit that it had been a pretty sweet ride, even if it did leave her somewhat swaying in her seat.

"It goes upwards of 18,000 miles an hour in that one part, you know." She nodded.

"Soooo... what do you want to do? Anything? We've got literally all the space for projects, and unlimited time too."

"Well, I mean, I really just want to get home."

Phineas eyes' briefly fell away from her face. "Don't we all. But we haven't figured out a way yet, and there's no point in doing nothing while we come up with new ideas."

Candace's stomach growled. "I could use some food. Do you have anything to eat?"

"Do we? And how! Come on."

He helped her and her I.V. rack out of the coaster and began leading back down the path, away from the booth. Glancing at the clear bag of liquid hanging from it, she was relieved to see that it was nearly empty. In just a little bit of time it would be completely emptied, and she'd stop having to tote this huge metal thing around. The two of them took another short walk along a path, stopping at last at a large collection of the robot-staffed booths she had seen before. There were more of them here, like forty, and they were stocked with every food imaginable.

"This is our buffet. It's great! Except Ferb's zucchini pasta." Phineas wrinkled his nose. "That's nasty. Zucchini! Bleh. But everything else is amazing." He handed her a plate from a stand nearby and followed her as she walked around the booths.

"Aren't you going to eat?" she asked, slightly concerned. He was already really pale, if he had lost his appetite as well...

"Oh, no, I'm not hungry. You gotta remember, it's barely five o'clock in the morning. I had dinner last night, but you've been unconscious since about eight in the morning yesterday when you fell in here."

That was true. Turning back to the vast array of foods, she finally settled on a tray holding some delicious looking and smelling grilled cheese sandwiches. Turning to Phineas, he smiled and said "Don't worry! They're lactose free. Force of habit."

Satisfied, she scooped up several sat them on the plate. Walking just a few yards away, she sat down at a picnic table for the meal. The grilled cheese sandwiches were amazing - warm and gooey and with bread slightly toasted. A few minutes of silence passed between them as she ate. At last full, she sat back with a satisfied sigh, and pushed the empty plate away.

"That was good."

"I'm glad you liked it. Here, now that you're done eating, let me get that catheter out."

Her eyes popped open wide. "I have a catheter in me?" If her own brother had put in a catheter, well, _that_ was an embarrassment she'd never get over.

Phineas seemed startled at her reaction. "Not that kind of catheter. The kind in your I.V."

"Oh." Just to be sure however, she added, "There's no ... other ... catheter is there?"

He returned her gaze with wide-eyed seriousness, not at all cognizant of her embarrassment. "No. You wouldn't need a urinary catheter unless you were gonna be bedridden for quite a bit longer than you were."

Relieved, she held out her arm as her brother pulled out a pair of latex gloves and a gauze bandage, quickly extracting the needle, and patching the small pinprick of blood that tried to leak out.

"There you go. I highly doubt that you'll have any problem with clotting that small of a hole, but if you do, don't worry, we have plenty of coagulant on hand."

"When did you become a medical professional?" she asked, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of thankfulness that he had apparently done so.

"Oh you know. Compared to the laws of the quantum mechanics, the human body isn't all that complex. Lots of it is fairly self-explanatory. But, I'm sure you know that now, hm?"

"Oh" she chuckled slightly. " Yeah, I guess so."

He laid the now loose I.V. tube on the table and sat down across from her.

"So? What was it like for you? It was great - I know it. What'd you make?"

Candace stared at the ground for a long moment. Did he even know about the bad things that had happened to her after she had gotten ahold of this so-called gift? Did he experience it the same way?

"I, uh, built a apartment building. You know, out of dirt."

He nodded excitedly. "That's so cool! What was it like? How big was it? What was the inside like?"

Despite her own misgivings about herself, and the sometimes less-than-pleasant way her urges manifested themselves, Phineas' enthusiasm was contagious, and she couldn't help but let it rub off on her somewhat, pushing her from nervousness and slight fear to cheer, and maybe even slightly over the edge into happiness as she told him all about the apartment building, with it's five stories and working elevator. He listened quietly as she talked about the teleportation system (although she left out where exactly she'd gotten the parts) and the space-time ripper. Just as she was talking about the propulsion system she'd designed for her rocket, he raised a hand to stop her.

"What is it?" she asked. He patted his pocket.

"Ferb's awake. He's gonna be here in a few seconds."

"A few seco- eee!" she let out a small shriek as a flash of purple and white light flickered brilliantly next to her, and her other brother materialized on the neighboring seat of the picnic table.

"Oh my gosh, I swear you are going to kill me with that thing." she scolded them both, but then grabbed up her second brother in a large hug. He said nothing, as was par for him, but smiled warmly at her, and Candace knew him well enough that the small smile said more than all of Phineas's exited speeches had. Once again, time seemed to slow to a stop as she finally laid eyes on her other brother. They were safe and well, both of them. It felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from her spirits. She took a deep breath, feeling better than she had in days.

Phineas said nothing for that moment, merely watching instead. For all the times she had mentally labelled him as oblivious to other's feelings, it seemed some things were obvious even to him.

"How have you been, Ferb?" she asked at last. He shrugged slightly.

"Has Phineas been driving you up the wall?" she asked, shooting a teasing glance at her other brother. For a second Phineas was silent, then he spoke.

"I think he's been handling me just fine." Ferb turned and looked at him, and he laughed.

"Yes, except for that. But that wasn't really my fault, you know."

"What are you talking about?" Candace asked.

"Oh, nothing. We had a small accident with one of our projects - we were testing the Flying Car of the Future, only today, but it was pulling to the right really bad and I crashed it into the skyscraper. On purpose, of course."

She smiled. "Of course." The three of them laughed for a few moments.

She turned and looked at the skyscraper just a short distance behind them.

"Oh, you can't see it from here - it was floors five thousand and six and five thousand and seven."

"And it didn't hurt the skyscraper at all?"

"Oh, no. Redundant support struts and self-repairing steel and all that."

"Oh."

"So... don't you have something to tell Ferb, hm?" Phineas asked, about as subtle as a punch to the face. Ferb turned to her questioningly.

"It's nothing really - I just was able to figure out how you guys build stuff, you know, and do it for myself a little bit."

"A little bit?" Phineas scoffed. "Ferb, she artificially opened the space-time rift she came here through. With a ripper." Ferb seemed impressed. He looked over at Phineas, and Phineas turned back to her.

"That's right! How funny do you think it is that Einstein thought his equation for energy and mass was complete without including a variable for quantum superposition?"

She hadn't really thought of it. Now that it had been brought up, it _did_ seem kind of funny.

"Have you tried timing yourself solving a Rubix Cube?" Phineas asked.

"What? Why? Can you do those too?"

"Sure! There's only forty-three and a quarter quintillion possible orientations for one, which makes them really easy to solve. Ferb and I once wrote out solution book for the first couple quintillion orientations, which was a really fun afternoon."

"That's pretty neat." Candace stretched her right arm back and ran it through her hair. "So, uh, what exactly have you guys been doing to get out of here? I mean, this place is great, but surely you'd rather be back in reality?"

"Well, of course. We've gone through .. uh ... ", Phineas pulled out his phone and glanced at it."Six thousand, three hundred and seventy-seven ideas for breaking open space-time from outside. So far, none have worked, but we'll find the way eventually."

She couldn't understand why they seemed to be unable to do it. If she'd done it, surely they could as well? "Why don't you guys just build the same sort Pizzazium Hypertronic Time Drive that I made to get here?"

Phineas glanced at Ferb. "We'd love to." he said. "But there's an awful shortage of Pizzazium Infinionite around these parts. There's only about zero point zero grams."

_None_? All the ways she knew to rip space and time involved some sort of Pizzazium, even if only in tiny amounts. Well, there were a handful of methods that _might_ work without it, but she'd never thought to try them. Pizzazium was so key in ripping time and space that it was pretty much irreplaceable.

"What about nega-"

"Negative mass only bends spacetime, never actually ripping it. You know that."

"I mean, I guess so. Maybe phase shifting?"

"Phase shifting? Into what? The fifth dimension of being? That doesn't help. Our roller coaster moves in 5D and never even comes close to breaking open the space-time continuum."

"Neutrino re-magnetization?"

"So we can ridge space-time? Nope. Doesn't work, unless you wanna crease reality."

"Gamma ambience power?"

"Not near enough power, even with all the gamma radiation in the multiverse."

"Flux wave capacitance?"

"If you wanna wait three hundred years for the next large enough flux wave, then sure, that'll work."

An odd sort of irritability was becoming evident in his voice as he shot down idea after idea. It was similar to the time he had had that panic attack when it appeared as if they had stranded themselves on the desert island on the ill-fated trip around the world a few months ago. It made Candace slightly nervous. She didn't want to push him too far, for fear of actually crossing the fine line between moodiness and the kind of _actual_ anger that she knew very occasionally came from him. Ferb said nothing, of course, but sat still and watched the conversation between them. With an almost visible internal effort, Phineas took a breath and calmed himself.

"I'm gonna go to bed. Candace, Ferb, I'll see you both in a bit." he abruptly stood up from the picnic table and pulled out his phone. He tapped on the screen a few times, then dematerialized in a flash of purple light. Candace turned to Ferb.

"Is something wrong?" Ferb looked at her, prompting an eye roll and a sigh.

"Come on...! You know I can't read your mind like Phineas does."

For a moment longer, silence passed between them. Then Ferb finally spoke, quietly.

"He wants to be home more than he seems to. Seven thousand failed attempts at something really becomes quite discouraging."

"You're telling me." she snorted, turning slightly away. The discouraging effect of failure was no stranger to her, especially after ten years of trying and failing to bust her brothers. Giving up was always an option, but why give up if you've already tried and failed at something for a majority of your life? Might as well keep at it, hoping that eventually something in the universe shifted and let you succeed. Of course, there was now the fact that she was able to stand in her brother's shoes to some degree, and see the world through the lenses of unrivaled knowledge, which could be a very painful thing.

"Say, Ferb?" she asked, turning to face him. He raised one eyebrow.

"Does anything ever happen to you or Phineas if you can't invent something?"

For a long while he didn't answer, and she got the feeling he was trying to tell her something with his face, something that was completely lost on her. Then he answered.

"It's not a pleasant feeling."

That was it? An _unpleasant_ feeling? The splitting headaches and constant shivering that it caused her had been considerably more than _unpleasant_. The reserved reply made her wonder again if her brothers even felt the same as she did.

"What do you mean by that?" she asked. He stared at her for a moment, gestured up to the skyscraper.

"You should talk to Phineas about this. It's much worse for him than me."

The response made her feel relieved and guilty at the same time. Relieved because it seemed as if there was someone after all who felt the same way she did about this. The guilt stemmed directly from the sheer fact that she was relieved. It seemed awfully selfish to wish that someone else had the same painful symptoms as yourself just so you could have someone to relate to. Shuddering slightly at her recent recollections, she decided that it _was_ selfish, especially when the person who had to suffer was someone like her younger brother. Then something else occurred to her - Phineas's 'slip of the tongue'.

"Ferb," she asked, "When I first told Phineas last night that I had gotten ahold of the... ability, I guess, to make all of this crazy stuff, he said ' _I'm so glad you've gotten it again_ '. He said it was just a mistake, do you know if that's true?"

He merely shrugged, but even Candace could tell that he really and truly knew nothing more about the matter. Perhaps it had been just a slip-up after all. She was going to bring up with him again at some point in the future. Maybe after they managed to get back to reality.

"Do you still have all of the things you've tried to get out of here?"

Carrying on a conversation with Ferb was a bit like talking to a wall because of how one-sided the speech was. Conversations with him always tended to be interspersed with long periods of silence, because Candace would feel like she was shutting him out of the conversation, even though she knew well enough that he was perfectly content to merely listen. It made for long pauses in talking, as she would say something and then stop, subconsciously waiting for a reply that would very likely not be coming. It wasn't like a wall so much as phone call with the other line muted - you know good and well that the other person can hear you, yet you still feel somewhat hesitant to talk at a normal pace because they never respond. Phineas never really had this problem; his conversations with Ferb were often just as fast-paced and lively as with anyone, but Phineas could read Ferb and his silent gestures much better than she could, which undoubtedly helped.

Ferb stood and motioned with his hand roughly to the left.

"What about my plate?" she asked, standing up.

A moment later, however, her query was answered as one of the staffing robots rolled over and scooped the up the plate. She wiped off the grilled-cheese grease on her napkin and tossed it onto the table. Following Ferb, she walked through the musical, colorful, highly-advanced paradise that her two brothers had created. The grass was soft underfoot, and the glowing lamps scattered about made up for the lack of sunlight - and apparent lack of a sun in general. After a short stroll, they reached the outskirts of the wonderland.

The grass ended, fading away into a perfectly smooth, flat, and gray ground that stretched unbroken to the horizon. The warm yellow lamplight was replaced by a cold ambient light that seemed to emanate from the dense mist bank in the air. Here thousands of contraptions, some large and some small, were scattered about. Some she could recognize by their appearance, and some not. The common shapes of flux capacitors, and quantum regulators, and hypertronic derivatives lie scattered among some of the more esoteric devices. So _this_ was the idea junkyard - a place where failed space-time rippers went to die.

As she walked among the immense piles of contraptions with her silent brother she was awed by the sheer amount of them. Phineas had previously said there were like sixty-seven hundred failed ideas, but that number seemed far greater when you were actually walking among sixty-seven hundred scrapped projects.

"And it's all because of a lack of Pizzazium Infinionite." she thought.

Leaning down to a particularly odd-looking project, she found that it was a beta ray neutron amplifier, designed to stimulate gravitron frequency via nucleonic degradation. Pressing the red button on it's side, the device rumbled and buzzed, then belched out a large cloud of steam with an alarming squeal. Hastily disabling the machine, she fanned away the steam and glanced around once more.

It seemed so strange, that a shortage of one key element was causing all this trouble. And to her brothers, no less. All her best ideas for making do without Pizzazium had been shot down by Phineas, leaving her wondering just how many ideas there were left. Phineas and Ferb had done some crazy things, but the lack of correct base materials was something that couldn't be worked around as easily around as other things. It wasn't hard to break the laws of physics or thermodynamics if you knew what you were doing, but doing it without the proper supplies made it way harder. And trying to do it without Pizzazium was like trying to make a flashlight without a bulb or a car without an engine or a teleportation matrix without a quantum ion stabilization protocol. All you'd end up with is an empty shell of a gadget that can do everything - _except_ actually work.

So, what then? Just give up? Here, now? The idea was not something she viewed with eagerness, but it was looming large on the horizon. If Phineas and Ferb had tried and failed not just once, but seven thousand times, who was _she_ to think she could do better? Shaking her head, she determined that she would at least make an attempt herself. Who knew? Maybe she'd get lucky.

Turning to Ferb, she asked "Where do you get your materials around here?" He made the 'follow me' gesture and turned around, leading her out of the junkyard. It was probably for the better too. That place was probably the first thing that Phineas and Ferb had ever made that truly was just soul-suckingly depressing.

The walk to the supply warehouse was much shorter than the one to the junkyard. It wasn't even that large of a warehouse - just a single room with a camera-like Molecular Re-atomizer sitting in the middle.

The Molecular Re-atomizer was a fascinating piece of technology, capable to tearing apart the protons, neutrons, and electrons of any given substance, and re-assembling them into any other substance. It was more or less an alchemist's dream come true - able to create raw materials of any kind from anything. Lump of carbon? With a little bit of Re-atomization, it could become gold, or titanium, or turkey, or even wood. Candace programmed in some instructions for the device, and waited patiently as it re-constructed the lumps of gray dirt from the ground into more useful substances. The only limitation on the device was creating materials that instantly decay - like astatine or Pizzazium. If you wanted to get those elements, you'd have to use a time machine to travel back to the instant they were created, and quickly grab them up before they decayed away. Of course, outside spacetime, there was no time to travel back through - so time machines didn't work and the highly unstable elements were lost forever.

Determined to at least make a show of effort in cracking the puzzle, Candace sat down with her new supplies and quickly constructed a Quantum Light Amplification Simulator that was intended to rip space-time via hard light obstruction of the continuum. Ferb sat next to her on the ground and helped, after watching her struggle a bit to operate a blowtorch with one hand. It didn't work, of course, and space-time flowed on unhindered by the device.

"Ferb," she asked, "Did you guys make a list of all the things you tried to make to get out of here?" He nodded, then reached into his pocket and handed her his phone.

Looking at the screen, she saw a _long_ list of ideas. Scrolling through, she became more and more despondent as she realized that all the things she had thought would work were already listed as having been unsuccessfully tried. Her ideas were entirely exhausted by the time she had reached item number 2,440 in the list - a Chemical Electron Voltage Respirator. Still she scrolled down the long list, eventually reaching the end. With a sigh, she handed Ferb back his phone.

"Do you have any new ideas?" she asked. There was no answer.

"Tell me, Ferb, is it actually hopeless? Or is there still a way?" It wasn't like her to give up so soon after undertaking something, but honestly, if there had already been seven thousand failed attempts at this, was there really that much of a chance that the seven thousand and first idea would be the fabled _one_? She heard him take in a breath and glanced back at his face, surprised to hear him speak again.

"If you don't give up hope, it can never be lost." The phrase was just the sort of thing that Ferb often said. Candace wasn't really in the mood for philosophical-sounding quips right at that moment, however.

"That's so deep-sounding," she replied, "But deep thoughts don't help rip space and time. Tell me straight and shallow: _Do you actually think there is a way?_ "

No reply was forthcoming. She let out a sigh.

"It's not so bad here, I guess. There's unlimited space and time and materials to do whatever we want - and its not like the people in reality will miss us. You guys aren't remembered at all, and I doubt I am - though it's possible that that creep still remembers me because he was so close to the rift when I fell in." She felt a small tap on her shoulder, and turned to face her brother.

He made some sort of motion with his hands. Candace sighed again. Despite not being an expert at reading him like Phineas was, even she could tell what he was asking.

"I don't mind." she replied. "I'll be fine." Ferb nodded gratefully and pulled out his phone again. A few taps on the screen later, and he disappeared in a flash of purple light.

Finding herself alone again, Candace slid along the floor to one wall of the warehouse, and slumped against it. Even though no one was there with her at the moment, the deep loneliness she had been carrying with her for the past few days was gone. She may have been trapped in a dimension beyond existence, but at least she was no longer alone. The irony of those thoughts while sitting by herself next to the Re-atomizer was not lost on her. Her right hand danced up and down the hard white cast on her other arm. Perhaps life out here wouldn't be so bad after all. She could build something to keep her busy - maybe a free floating trampoline or something. Eventually Phineas and Ferb would come up with a way to get back. They always did - it just might take some time.


	8. The Land Beyond Time Redux: The Silent Observer

I pressed the blue button on the bean cloner, watching as thousands upon thousands of dark brown beans poured from the drones in the sky, slowly piling on each other. The synchronized submarines had been kinda lame, so hopefully bean-mountain skiing would be enjoyable enough to rescue the day. I felt just the teeniest bit guilty for slacking off so hard on trying to get back to reality - but honestly, could anyone blame us?

Phineas and I had come up almost seven thousand separate possible ideas to get out of here, and we had tried every single one, and none of them had worked. Some had been spectacular failures, complete with dramatic smoke plumes and epic explosions. Others had been quiet and subdued, with only a wisp of steam and subtle electronic fizzling. Either way, none had worked, and it has really started wearing us down, and Phineas was really starting to show signs of stress. I don't know if he noticed anything unusual beginning to break through my normal character, but I definitely saw through his. There was a way out - there's always a way out - but he was determined to take a break before trying any further, and despite my internal misgivings, I eventually relented and and went along with him. That was where the submarines had come in; but like I said earlier, they weren't that great. So, bean skiing it was. A few minutes of work with bean-cloning technology and drones, and we had made a neatly efficient system for sculpting a mountain out of a mass of legumes. I really don't know where this idea came from - it's totally random, but did sound fun, kind of like the majority of my brother's ideas.

After just a few minutes, our bean mountain was done.

"Come on, Ferb," Phineas exclaimed, grabbing up his ski poles from the ground, "Let's do this thing!"

Awkwardly walking in my skis, I half-slid and half-walked over to the ski lift and sat down. Strapping in, he pressed the button that started the lift. The ride to the top of bean mountain was fairly long - almost ten minutes. The top had a great view of the huge grass patch we had planted and established our little town within. And if you looked in the other direction, you got a great view of infinitely stretching grayness, which served as a great reminder of just where we were. Determined to enjoy myself, however, I shoved those thoughts aside and slid off the ski lift seat. The mass of beans was squishy, and smelled strongly of dinner, but was surprisingly stable for something made of, well, beans.

"Race you to the bottom!" he yelled to me over the loud whipping of the artificial wind we had created with a huge fan. I gave him a thumbs up and smiled, and dug my poles into the ground, ready to go on the signal.

"3! 2! 1! GO!" And we were off. I crouched low, shoving hard against the slimy mass of beans to gain speed. The surface of the mountain sloped steeply down once you got a few feet away from the summit, providing for excellent skiing. Bean juice was splattered everywhere, as we flew along, remaining evenly matched the entire way. It looked to be another photo finish, but we were suddenly interrupted by a most surprising development. Up ahead, this blur of red and white sort of shot straight down from the sky, crashing directly into the bean mountains base in a huge spurt of brown liquid - the insides of thousands of squashed beans. It was so entirely unexpected that Phineas and I completely forgot about skiing, and just sort of stared at it - which resulting in us crashing into each other, and collapsing to the ground, covered in bean residue.

"Okay," he said "There's no doubt - that was awesome. And way cooler than those submarines."

I nodded and then pointed down the mountain to where the strange meteorite had landed. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing I was: _Where had the meteor come from?_

Our souped-up radar array had given us absolutely zero indication of any other heavenly bodies at all here in the non-dimension. And since our array had also indicated that the unstable time loop that had dumped us here had ended, there was no telling how it had gotten there. As far as we had seen, the gray mist bank that started about thirty feet in the air continued upwards for ever and ever. Our skyscraper had reached two trillion stories, and the top story was still in the mist, with no sign on degrading atmosphere or declining gravity. We helped each other to our feet, and slowly skied over to the meteor crash site, intent on figuring out just where it had come from, and what it was made of. Maybe we would get lucky, and it would be made of solid Pizzazium.

But what we found was even more surprising that a meteor. It was a person! It was girl, lying perfectly still and silent at the bottom of a small bean crater, so covered in bean juice that we could hardly tell whether she was alive or dead. Only slight breathing noises confirmed that she was, indeed, alive. Both of us were also covered in bean juice, but Phineas nonetheless wiped his hand on what was probably the only dry spot on his shirt and then reached out to wipe the slime off her face, intent on seeing if we could recognize her. I was in for another shock, as he did so.

It was Candace! Our older sister, who had somehow tumbled from wherever she had been into our little slice of not-existing.

Phineas was equally surprised as I was, although his reactions were much more exaggerated than mine. Neither of us could understand how she had gotten here - the best I could figure at the moment was that maybe there had been a quantum error, and a rift had somehow remained open after the time loops had ceased. That in itself was highly unlikely, seeing as the first thing we had done after we saw that the loops had stopped was to scan the area for rifts that managed to stay open.

However she had managed to do it, one thing was for sure. She was here now, and wasn't doing so well, by the looks of it. I saw a dark red liquid oozing out from underneath her, standing out in stark contrast to the brown bean juice. That wasn't a good sign. Phineas rolled her over onto her back, and we saw that her left arm was crumpled up underneath her body, obviously having taken the largest blow in the fall. It bent at an unnatural angle, twice, in places were one's arm is not supposed to bend. There was a long gash on her forearm, from which blood was rapidly flowing, staining a frayed rope that had presumably torn the skin so. That was even worse - if we weren't quick, it could easily mean very bad things, considering blood-clotting disorders and whatnot.

"Ferb!" he said, "Hand me your map of the world!" I pulled the tiny paper packet out of my shirt pocket, and unfolded until it was easily twice as long as person. We laid it out on the ground next to Candace, and gently pushed her onto it. The super-strong paper stretched under her weight, but it didn't tear. We each grabbed ahold of one side of the paper and lifted it up, making some sort of crude stretcher-like device. I pulled out my phone and rapidly opened the teleportation matrix network. With the press of a few buttons, purple light flashed around us, and we were instantly transported back to our main experimentation and construction area. With a little work, we hefted the paper stretcher up and onto a picnic table.

"Alright, you take care of long-term aid, and I'll take care of first aid" Phineas directed.

Quickly grabbing up my toolbox from the ground, I gave him another thumbs up and rushed down the trail to the Molecular Re-atomizer storage warehouse. The distance to it was short, and when taken at the rapid pace I used, even shorter. When I arrived at the small building, I paused.

Phineas wanted me to take care of long-term aid? I supposed that hospital would be the best place for long-term medical care. So a hospital it was. Using the Molecular Re-atomizer, I created vast amounts of concrete and steel and glass and acrylic and fiberglass and other stuff that hospitals are built from. I quickly loaded the supplies onto a moveable pallet using a powerful tractor beam designed for just such a purpose. I drove the moveable pallet a little ways along the grass until I found a sufficiently clear area. Working rapidly, I laid concrete and mortar, stacked bricks, wired lights, and tiled floors. A tiny one-room hospital was built up from the ground in record speed. I designed and painted the interior to look exactly like a normal hospital back home. It was somewhat calming to be constructing something that I knew was going to work. In the past few days, I'd built more failed projects than in the rest of my life combined. Stopping permanently wasn't a choice - but it did rag on you a bit.

Just as I finished hanging the bland hospital curtains, Phineas appeared behind me with a rolling stretcher, on which laid Candace, left arm now set in cast. They were both clean again, as opposed to me, who was still covered in bean slime. Phineas smiled and threw me his Sterilizer Ray, and I used it instantly clean myself and sterilize the hospital.

"Nice job!" he said, as we worked together to lift Candace from the stretcher onto the bed. I nodded, and watched as he hooked her up to the heart monitor and an I.V. When he finished, he glanced up at me, and I raised my eyebrows at him. He had suddenly gone incredibly pale and waxy.

"The majority of the force of the fall was centered on her left arm - it broke in two places, along the forearm. I did a preliminary scan of the rest the body and couldn't find any trace of concussion or spinal trauma. Also, check this out."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small mound of stuff - Candace's phone, an odd-looking silvery box, a bundle of papers, and a small paper ball. He dumped most of the stuff into the small bedside table, but handed me the paper bundle. Reading it, I discovered that it was medical records from just two days ago - for Candace. She'd gotten in some kind accident and bled out at the museum. Frightening stuff. I handed the papers back to him and motioned at him with my hand, asking what had happened to him to so entirely drain his color.

"Oh, its nothing. You know how Candace is when it comes to really bad bleeding, and we don't have a blood bank here." Oh. I understood now. Still though, how much of his own blood had he drained to give to her? He looked like he was about to faint. He easily read my face and replied accordingly.

"She _is_ almost twice my size Ferb. Though it wasn't that much for her, it was quite a bit for me. But I'll be fine. Just need to relax for a bit." I shook my head. It wouldn't have taken but a handful of extra minutes to whip up some blood substitute.

"I know we could have made some." he answered my unspoken thought. "But I didn't want to wait. It was an emergency." I pulled out my phone and quickly typed in an order for the food-bots as we stood in the dimly lit room. Just a few moments later, a robot rolled in, holding a large glass of orange juice.

"Thanks." he said, picking it up and taking a gulp. "So, what now?" I shrugged. Maybe we should recheck our radar array for quantum error rifts? He nodded at me.

"That's a good idea. I had to give her some sleeping medicine to ensure she wouldn't come to during the bone-resetting process. She won't come to for a good many hours, so we have plenty of time." He drained the rest of his juice, and thankfully ordered a new glass. We walked quietly out of the room and shut the door behind us. We didn't have to be quiet - we could have staged a concert in the room without waking her from the medicated sleep, but things like that come from habit.

We walked together from the hospital building to the mega radar array on the other side of the little town. Phineas was quiet for the most of the walk, probably running out of breath. I shook my head at him and he grinned sheepishly and ducked his head.

"I should be back to normal before this time tomorrow. Come on, you can't act like you wouldn't do the same thing if you could." He was right - I would have. Only the fact that my blood type was incompatible with everyone in the family except Dad would have prevented me from doing so. Still, that wouldn't save him from some good-natured ribbing.

When we reached the radar array, I sat down at the seat and quickly performed some calibrations, then activated it and scanned the entire realm of non-existence to a radius of ten thousand miles. No rifts were found. I shook my head and turned to Phineas. He was the ideas guy - maybe he'd have an idea as to how Candace had somehow gotten here.

"That's so odd. There's no natural rifts. I wonder if she found an _artificial_ rift. Hm..." his voice trailed away. I looked at him in surprise. If Candace had found a rift-making device of some sort, then why had she just jumped foolhardily into it created? And why had it apparently closed up behind her after she did so? No, in my opinion, it was likely that there had been some sort of brief quantum error. Even that was unlikely, but who could say? The space-time continuum was still healing from the scarring caused by the recently-resolved unstable time loop.

For the rest of the day, we idly built more stories onto our skyscraper, eventually hitting the two trillion four hundred million mark.

"Just think of it!" Phineas had said, "Just another hundred million stories and it will be the two and a half trillion story skyscraper."

That was true, and while building skyscrapers endlessly into an infinite sky was enjoyable, I really would have preferred to be working on something to get us back to reality. But, Phineas was the ideas person, and if he was temporarily out of ideas, then I really couldn't blame him. My ideas for getting back to reality had numbered only about fifty or so, which paled in comparison to the six thousand plus he had come up with.

If he was set on taking a break, then I supposed he had earned it. We stayed close to the hospital just in case of emergency, and played checkers and chess and cards. There's no sun in the land beyond time, and not even a light/dark cycle. Only mine and Phineas's cellphones bore the proof of the passage of time. Of course, one of our priorities had been establishing a frame of temporal reference, which we had quickly done, but it was very likely to be up to several seconds ahead or behind actual time. The longer we stayed here, the more out of sync our clocks would become, but that couldn't be helped. As eventide approached, and we grew tired, it occurred to me that it might be a very frightening experience for Candace if she were to wake up in the room, alone, and have no one around. Phineas estimated that the sleeping medication would wear off around three or four in the morning, but there was no way to tell if she'd immediately wake up or continue sleeping after that point.

So we agreed to stay up shifts, waiting in the small waiting room connected to the hospital, so that at least one of us would be guaranteed to be awake at all times. Phineas took the first shift, from nine to midnight, and I took the second, from midnight to four. That was pretty much how I came to be in my current situation, sitting alone in a waiting room at one in the morning. Though it never gets dark here, it's rather dimly lit in this room, and gives the impression of night quite well. The window is curtained shut, and sometimes I imagine going over to it, and thrusting it aside, and seeing the black night sky with all its thousands of stars. If I were to actually do so, I would see no such thing. The gray misty sky of this place would still be lit brightly and coldly, even though it's past midnight now.

It makes me think of Mom and Dad back home. What are they doing now? Probably sleeping. Now that Candace has shown up on our side of the rift, they likely have no memory of any of the three of us. I wonder how different their lives are? This place that Phineas and I have built here is wonderful, but I'd instantly give it up to be back where we belong. And why shouldn't I? What use is having everything, when you have no one to share it with? Not that I have no one - Phineas is obviously here, and I couldn't wish for a better companion, but this place is really starting to grate on us both. Ever since the incident with the Molecular Separator, I've been paying much closer to attention to Phineas, how he behaves, and talks, and generally just interacts with the world at large. And while I still haven't seen any traces of the sort of despairing fear that was embodied in his half, there have been other things.

Phineas does want to get home, and just as badly, if not worse, than I. But he seems to be having a hard time coming to terms with it. I can admit it - I can say that I am homesick to a degree, and that I would rather be there than here, even after all the cool things we've done. But can he? I don't know. He hasn't said so to me, and I don't think he will anytime soon. It was partly for this reason that I was so surprised this morning when he told me he wanted to take a break from potential space-time ripping devices. He assured me that nothing was the matter, and that he merely wanted a break from the struggle. I can understand that, but it was still strangely out of the ordinary for him.

And now Candace is here. This is a strange sort of snarl in the plans we had. Not that our so-called plans were really of any weight. I can say without hesitation that it's very nice to see another face in this place. Phineas is pleasant enough, but it is very nice to have other people around, if only just to bring some sort of difference to the pattern our lives have rapidly fallen into over these past few days. And who better to spice up the pattern that Candace anyway? If anyone could really make things interesting around here, it's got to be her. I don't particularly know how we are going to explain the whole situation to her, but I'm sure Phineas will manage. She was standing outside the original unstable time loop, so that will make the explanation that much simpler.

I suppose it's rather selfish of me to be relieved that she's here - the other side of the same token is that she is _here_. You know, trapped outside of reality on a plane of non-existence beyond space and time. A place where the exit seems to be unreachable for now. A place where whatever enters is forgotten to all, and is wiped from the past, present, and future to some degree. I suppose our parent's lives are much more boring now, with their memories of us three completely erased. It's also quite unfortunate the way Candace had to arrive here. Phineas and I calculated the exact position of the rift where she came in, based on how quickly she was falling and the radius of the crater she made in our bean mountain. It was a good sixty feet in the air, opening straight into the fog bank that rolls endlessly above. I say _was_ , because there's nothing there now, of course, but that was a given. Candace really was lucky with the way she landed - and it seems foolish to say that, considering her left was broken twice in the process - but it really could have been much worse. Like, severe spinal trauma worse. She won't be particularly happy to wake up with her arm in a cast, but it's infinitely better than waking up a quadriplegic.

My thoughts were pretty much run dry on that note, so I set down the journal, and leaned back against the wall with a sigh. The silence that hung down like a shroud over the room was only ever-so-slightly disturbed by a muffled beeping coming from the next room - the sound of a cardiac monitor. The silence wasn't uncomfortable, however. I'm quite used to it, and almost prefer it to the loud cacophony of sounds that almost always follow my brother around. Before Dad met Mom, and I met Phineas, I spoke even more rarely than I do now. It seems a strange thing to say, considering I'm still often labelled as 'the quiet one'. It's not for some deep reason, really - I just very often feel as if there's nothing to say. If there is, then Phineas takes care of it for me easily ninety nine percent of the time. I don't have any particular qualms about speaking, and will not hesitate to speak up if it becomes necessary. But with someone like Phineas, who can so easily read my unspoken expressions, it would be terribly redundant for me to constantly speak my mind. And besides, there's so much you can learn about people if you just listen to them. And not just when they are talking - but when they are acting. Actions speak far louder than words, but they are still quiet enough to go unnoticed by many people. Maybe someday I'll come across a situation where my way of going about things will not work, but I suppose that I will cross that bridge when I get there. My eyes lazily followed the hands on the clock around and around as I waited for my shift to end.

It was by no means a short wait, but it ended at last. Right on the dot of four in the morning, the door to the waiting room swung open, and Phineas walked in. He was still incredibly pale, but a tiny hint of color was beginning to return to his face. I smiled and nodded at him as we traded places, and I left the room and him behind. Once outside of the hospital, I quickly used the teleportation functionality in my phone to transport myself to floor three of our skyscraper - which Phineas and I had chosen for our bedroom. As I grabbed the doorknob and swung it the door open, I couldn't help but feel as if the balance of emotions in the dimension of non-existence was about to be upset. And not necessarily because of or even in spite of Candace, but just _because_. Phineas wanted home - and he seemingly wasn't able to make it happen. Trouble was brewing on the horizon, and though my brother had done an excellent job of keeping it under wraps, the atmosphere he emitted was slowly shifting anyway.

As I crawled into bed, one thing I knew for sure: tomorrow (such as it was in a place where there was no time) was going to be quite interesting. A strange feeling of dread began building up in my gut, warning against a future I could not see. But I couldn't worry about it now - I needed to sleep.

* * *

I awoke the next morning at exactly 7:00 in the morning, the buzzing of my alarm clock rousing me from my sleep. It had been only three hours since I'd gone to bed, but it had helped somewhat stave off encroaching fatigue. Rolling over in bed, I picked up my phone, and glanced at my notifications. There were texts from Phineas - of course. Who else would they be from? The cell tower we had erected out here handled the traffic between our two phones, but would most definitely not handle traffic from different planes of reality.

_Phineas ( 4:36 AM)_

_Candace is awake! Seems lucid - no signs of any other issues._

_Phineas ( 6:43 AM)_

_We are eating some breakfast at the main food buffet. Should still be there by the time you wake up. Got something really cool to tell you!_

Those two messages were the only ones, yet they said all they needed to say. Candace was awake, seemed healthy, and apparently there was good news. Perhaps Phineas had figured out to get out of here? Climbing quickly out bed, I rapidly changed out of my pajamas. Superficially running a comb through my hair, I pulled up the teleportation interface on my phone. A few taps, and purple light - the color of faster-than-light travel - shone around me, instantly moving me from my bedroom to the picnic table at the buffet. As I materialized, I caught the tail end of a yelp from my sister, who was sitting directly next to the point where I would arrive. No doubt Phineas had set that up purposefully.

"-eee!" A moment passed, and she spoke again. "I swear, you are going to kill me with that thing." Then she grabbed me in a one-armed hug the likes of which I had never gotten from anyone. I hugged her back, and felt her arm tremble slightly on my back. It was nice to see her again, for sure. As she drew back, I smiled at her, hoping to convey how I felt.

After a few moments of us looking at each other, and Phineas staring at us from across the table, she finally spoke again.

"How have you been, Ferb?" I shrugged. How had I been? Alright, I suppose. As far as comfort and entertainment and time-wasters went, we couldn't have been doing better. Despite all of it's shortcomings, the situation we were in was no doubt considerably less harsh than it could have been.

"Has Phineas been driving you up a wall?" she asked, peeking at Phineas out of the corner of her eye. Honestly, if I just relaxed a bit and didn't watch my brother so closely, I'd probably be having a much better time. As it was, he was sort of driving me up a wall - but it was purely my fault and not his. Phineas spoke up at this point, not about to let the friendly jab slide.

"I think he's been handling me just fine." I took this as my turn to cast a significant glance at my brother. He smiled at me, and I smiled back, and he laughed for a short moment.

"Yes, except for that. But that wasn't really my fault you know." Even based on that vague statement, I knew _exactly_ what he was talking about. He was right - it wasn't technically his fault. But the wreckage scattered about the 5,006th and 5,007th floors of our skyscraper didn't really care about technicalities, now did it?

"What are you talking about?" Candace asked, showing a surprising amount of curiosity into our inside joke. I perked up my eyebrows. Something about Candace was ... off. I couldn't lay my finger on it, exactly, but she seemed ... calmer that usual. Now ' _calmer than usual_ ' may not sound like a big deal to you, but when you apply that label to someone like my sister, it becomes a pretty big deal.

"Oh, nothing. We had a small accident with one of our projects - we were testing the Flying Car of the Future, only today, but it was pulling to the right really bad and I crashed it into the skyscraper. On purpose, of course."

Candace smiled. "Of course." The snark was being buttered on pretty thickly, if I do say so myself. But it was entirely good-natured, or at least seemed so.

She turned and looked at our skyscraper, obviously trying to see if she could spot any signs of the crash.

"Oh, you can't see it from here - it was floors five thousand and six and five thousand and seven."

"And it didn't hurt the skyscraper at all?" The repeated questions about our mishap only heightened my sense of awareness that Candace was somehow different from what she had been four days ago, when we fell through the temporal rift.

"Oh, no. Redundant support struts and self-repairing steel and all that." And thirty minutes of repairing shattered electron conduits, but he left _that_ part out, of course.

"Oh."

"So... don't you have something to tell Ferb, hm?" Phineas egged her on, piquing my curiosity even more. The 'really cool' thing Phineas had to tell me was actually from Candace? By now I was dying to know. Perhaps whatever it was would explain her strange behavior.

"It's nothing really - I just was able to figure out how you guys build stuff, you know, and do it for myself a little bit." _What_? I could hardly believe my own ears. My shell-shocked reaction was smoothly covered by my silent reputation, but in that moment, when I didn't move a single muscle, it was most definitely not self-composure. How had this happened? It was great news, just as Phineas had said. But where had this come from? I'd never seen even the slightest hint of anything of the sort in my older sister. I wasn't as close with her as I was with Phineas, of course, but still, come on! I would have hoped that I would have been at least attentive to discern some hint of this new development. And just last night I had been going on in my head about 'listening to other's actions'. It was obvious there was still much I didn't know about - even in the people I knew the best.

"A little bit?" Phineas spoke up, jarring me from my frozen surprise. "Ferb, she artificially opened the space-time rift she came here through. With a ripper." I looked at my brother, studying his face for any hint of a possible joke. There was none - and what's more, I could see in his eyes that he was being dead serious. Well, if this was really happening, I supposed I could get used to it. I wondered if Candace would be motivated to join Phineas and I in our exploits. I also wondered if she experienced withdrawals if she went to long without inventing, in sort of the way Phineas and I did. Everyone experiences them differently, of course, and they are worse for Phineas than for me. That's not to say they are in any way pleasant, or even bearable for a long term, but I was usually able to continue functioning even in the throes of withdrawing, unlike Phineas, who became practically paralyzed.

"That's right! How funny do you think it is that Einstein thought his equation for energy and mass was complete without including a variable for quantum superposition?" I glanced back at Candace, trying to read her reaction to the joke. It was kind of an important joke to Phineas and I, having been part of what really brought us together when Mom and Dad first met. Not many people got it - even Baljeet had needed Phineas to briefly explain it. And of course, by briefly, I mean a short lecture on quantum tunneling that was an easy twenty minutes long. In a strange twist, Buford had immediately gotten the joke and started laughing, but only because he had misheard it - and assumed for some strange reason that both 'Einstein' and 'Quantum Superposition' were named chickens doing something in a vaccary, which is a little-used word meaning 'barn' that he had gotten from 'variable'. I still to this day don't know what he thought was funny about the two chickens or the barn, but I digress. Some things, I think, we are not meant to understand.

"Have you tried timing yourself solving a Rubix Cube?" Phineas asked her.

"What? Why? Can you do those too?" Her response seemed somewhat surprised - which was in itself surprising. After all, hadn't she been in the yard when Phineas and I built that giant puzzle tower? The one that had 'trapped' the entire galaxy in an unbreakable flexitube capsule? I could have sworn that I had seen her down in the yard during that whole debacle. What had she been doing down there that she _didn't_ see the huge puzzle tower and make the connection that yes, puzzles are something that Phineas and I enjoy? I didn't want to be too harsh on her, however. If she really had suddenly come into the grasp of the sort of inventing frame of mind that Phineas and I shared, it was probably quite a leap from the normalcy of her life. I couldn't remember a time before it for myself, for as far as I remembered, I had always enjoyed creating things with my hands.

"Sure! There's only forty-three and a quarter quintillion possible orientations for one, which makes them really easy to solve. Ferb and I once wrote out solution book for the first couple quintillion orientations, which was a really fun afternoon." I looked at Phineas as he spoke. That book - _3 Quintillion Answers and Where to Find Them_ \- had been pretty fun to write.

"That's pretty neat." Candace reached back and stretched with her good arm, then cast her eyes about somewhat nervously. "So, uh, what exactly have you guys been doing to get out of here? I mean, this place is great, but surely you'd rather be back in reality?" The tone of the question was much different than her previous ones, almost as if she was unsure about what the answer would be.

"Well, of course. We've gone through .. uh ... six thousand, three hundred and seventy-seven ideas for breaking open space-time from outside. So far, none have worked, but we'll find the way eventually." The list Phineas was referring to was slightly outdated - it was now 6,378. I'd forgotten to add the time we tried the Photovoltaic Neutronic Phaser Array the day before yesterday. The PNPA had been the last thing we had tried before Phineas had refused to do anymore space-time ripper experimentation, but that wasn't an excuse to forget to update the list. I'd have to do that whenever I got a moment.

Phineas's answer obviously confused Candace. A puzzled twist knotted up her eyebrows for second before she spoke again.

"Why don't you guys just build the same sort Pizzazium Hypertronic Time Drive that I made to get here?"

Phineas looked at me, his eyes communicating exactly what I was thinking. _Candace doesn't know about the Pizzazium shortage._

"We'd love to." he said, "But there's an awful shortage of Pizzazium Infinionite around these parts. There's only about zero point zero grams."

For the second time in row, Candace paused before replying to the answer of her question. This time, however, she seemed rather stunned. Since she had built the space-time ripper that had gotten her here, I assumed she knew about the importance of Pizzazium when it came to ripping the space-time continuum.

"What about nega-" she began, before Phineas cut her off.

"Negative mass only bends spacetime, never actually ripping it. You know that, too." The interruption was so unexpected, and so rude-sounding, that it took me aback. What had happened to my brother? Candace seemed equally unsure of herself.

"I mean, I guess so. Maybe phase shifting?"

"Phase shifting? Into what? The fifth dimension of being? That doesn't help. Our roller coaster moves in 5D and never even comes close to breaking open the space-time continuum." The replies from Phineas only increased in their snappishness.

"Neutrino re-energization?"

"So we can ridge space-time? Nope. Doesn't work, unless you wanna crease reality." By now, I could tell something was _very_ wrong, something that I hadn't seen before. When Phineas had wanted a break from space-time rippers, I had resisted at first, but then relented, as I usually did, and had gone along with him. But Candace didn't know any of that - and she kept pressing him, which was highly unwise.

"Gamma ambience power?"

"Not near enough power, even with all the gamma radiation in the multiverse." By now, I was mentally trying to tell Candace to back off. My look of ' _please let this go for now_ ' flew unheeded over her head. Should I interfere? It seemed a bad idea to attempt to insert myself into this situation. Phineas only very rarely got upset - and even more rarely at his family, Candace included. But when he did, whew boy. It was pretty ugly - especially coming from someone who was normally as happy-go-lucky as he.

"Flux wave capacitance?"

"If you wanna wait three hundred years for the next large enough flux wave, then sure, that'll work." At this point, Phineas shifted in his seat at the picnic table until he was facing away from the both of us. Candace seemed to finally realize that this wasn't a good idea to be pursuing, but it was too late - the damage had been done. With a huge sigh, Phineas abruptly shoved himself off the seat and pulled out his phone.

"I'm gonna go to bed. Candace, Ferb, I'll see you both in a bit." His voice was trembly, as if only by some great effort had he prevented himself from stammering.

Purple light flashed, and he was gone. I looked over at Candace, and saw a mask of nervousness filtering her face. _Come on, Phineas_ , I mentally told my brother, even though he was no longer here. _Can't you keep it under control at least when talking to Candace? Think what's happened to her? Falling through a rift of her own creation, injuring herself in the process of getting here, only to find that there's no current way out?_

It was disappointing, and part of me wanted to see if I could go and talk him down from whatever heights he had worked himself up to. The outburst had been so out of character, and yet, not entirely without precedence. If I had learned anything from my observations of people's behavior, it was that nothing ever happened with a reason. It may not always be a good reason, but there would _always_ be a reason. And I had a strong feeling that I knew Phineas's reason, and the idea made me somewhat nervous myself. But the unease dripping from Candace's every limb kept me sitting next to her. I'd at least keep her company until she felt comfortable again. Then, I'd have to go see what could be done about my brother.

Candace turned to face me directly. "Is something wrong?" she asked. I slightly shrugged my shoulders. _Well, something's definitely up, but I'm not sure what exactly._ She rolled her eyes.

"Come on...! You know I can't read your mind like Phineas does." That was true. She wanted an answer - but I really had none to give. After a moment of thought, I decided that Candace at least deserved the truth. It wouldn't be much, but it would be all that I knew for sure.

"He wants to be home more than he seems to. Seven thousand failed attempts at something really becomes quite discouraging." Even as the words came out of my mouth, I couldn't help but feel as if they weren't actually true. Failure in and of itself didn't usually bother Phineas. There was something else afoot, something lurking just beneath the surface, defying all my attempts to label it.

"You're telling me" she snorted, shifting in her seat. I raised one eyebrow. What had happened in her life that she was referring to? It wasn't something that I knew of, for sure. Perhaps she had struggled in assembling the space-time ripper to get here? It was unlikely - by the time you understand the concepts behind things like the space-time continuum, the building part isn't that hard.

"Say, Ferb," she spoke up again, turning back to face me, "Does anything ever... _happen_ to you or Phineas if you can't invent something?"

Ah. She had experienced withdrawals, at least to some degree, it seemed. I wondered to just what degree? Were they like mine, an intense pressure that built up behind my forehead, that made me just want to scream incoherently for no apparent reason? It was regrettable that she had to deal with this sort of thing as well, but it couldn't really be helped. Phineas and I had done some research to see if we could find a cure for them, but the only one there was involved memory wiping and free will override - and even then wasn't completely permanent. The mathematical concepts behind the things we do fundamentally alter the state of a person's brain, on a very physical level. On that day, we had decided that it was worth it, in our opinion. After all, as long as we kept a semi-regular schedule of construction, withdrawing would never become an issue. I suddenly became aware of Candace staring at me, waiting on an answer. My thoughts stalled momentarily, and I couldn't think of a way to articulate what I had been thinking.

At last I said,"It's not a pleasant feeling." Which was the truth, no doubt.

"What do you mean by that?" I could tell by the tone of her voice that my reserved reply had not satisfied her. She wanted someone who could empathize with her, and I really wasn't the person to do that. My symptoms were much more internal than external, and were much less visible than Phineas's. That's not to say they were any less intense, but there was less of a noticeable effect.

"You should talk to Phineas about this. It's much worse for him than me." The cop-out of an answer made me feel somewhat guilty for skirting around the subject so, especially when Phineas was in no shape to talk about such an uncomfortable subject. Candace was my sister too, in every way except blood, but the sort of things that I felt if I began withdrawing were very unpleasant to talk about - mostly because if I talked about them, I had to think back and remember how they felt. It had been a long while since either of us had gone through them, but the memories were still fresh in my mind. I could feel a chill gathering in my spine just thinking about it. Thankfully, however, Candace took the hint and dropped the subject.

"Ferb, when I first told Phineas last night that I had gotten ahold of the ability, I guess, to make all of this crazy stuff, he said ' _I'm so glad you've gotten it again_ '. He said it was just a mistake, do you know if that's true?" What? The strange question sort of came out of left field. How was I supposed what Phineas and Candace conversed about without my presence? Phineas was in a fragile state of mind, apparently, and so I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if he had tripped over his words somewhat. I shrugged, trying to tell her that _I have no idea what you are talking about_. For a long while she just sat there and stared at me. I suspected that she was waiting for me to say something, as she often did when we talked, but I had nothing to say, and so remained quiet.

At last, she broke the silence that had descended over us both.

"Do you still have all of the things you've tried to get out of here?" I smiled slightly. She'd gotten ahold of the creative spark, alright. My sister, wanting to see the huge pile of failed inventions that we had piled up outside our town? It was like she had been struck with some sort of mind-modifying beam. Only, it had been far more effective and permanent that any mind-modifying beam could ever hope to be. Free will is a powerful thing and can only ever be temporarily overruled with fancy gadgets. Any mind-warping ray is always at risk of losing it's grasp on someone's consciousness if a powerful enough motivation is placed before the affected person. Nevertheless, I pointed in the general direction of the Fail Zone, as I had named it in my mind.

Candace stood up and readjusted the sling over her shoulder, obviously wanting to go there immediately. Well, okay. I wasn't doing anything at the moment - though I did eventually need to get alone with my brother and help him hash through whatever was bothering him. She asked about the plate she had been eating off of before I arrived, but I waved it off, knowing that our robots would take care of it. Motioning for her to follow me, I set off along the path from the buffet booths to the Fail Zone. It wasn't a massively long walk, maybe all of twenty minutes, and that was longer than normal because we walking a bit slower than usual. As we approached the destination, the grassy field we had planted abruptly ended, and changing back into the infinite gray plain that been everywhere before we covered up the little bit around where we had decided to set up shop.

I walked next to Candace as she wandered about in the vast junkyard of projects. It was huge - almost 80,000 tons of tungsten and steel and 400,000 miles of wiring had gone into all of the things lying around abandoned on the ground. I watched in amusement as she tried to turn on Attempt #4,568 : a beta ray neutron amplifier. That one would have been an excellent steam machine, if it was designed for that purpose. The unnatural sounds and belching clouds that poured out of it startled her, and she quickly shut it down. For quite a while the two of us paced up and down the rows and rows of defunct machines, with not a word passing between us. Only the faint, faraway sound of empty roller coaster cars on their endless loops broke the silence. Maybe there was some sort of parallel to be drawn between Phineas and I and the empty coaster cars, always going and going, and yet getting nowhere.

When Candace finally spoke again, I had gotten so accustomed to the silence between us, that I was slightly startled.

"Where do you get your materials around here?" So, she wanted to see the Molecular Re-atomizer? Motioning for her to follow, I led her from the Fail Zone to the Re-atomizer's warehouse, the place where just yesterday I had produced the materials that had very likely played a major part in how well she was recuperating after her tumultuous fall into the mountain of beans.

When I opened the warehouse door for her, she didn't even stop to ask me how it worked - instead grabbing it up, and printing out a decently-sized stack of raw materials. Watching her do that was quite strange, to be sure. I'd have to get used to it, and would as time went by, but right now, it was quite strange. She went over to a nearby shelf and grabbed up my toolbox from where I had left it yesterday, then seated herself on the floor. As I watched her begin to put her project together, I was amazed at how much she reminded me of Phineas.

Indeed, it was such a strong resemblance that it felt entirely natural when I sat down next to her to hold the blowtorch for her. Welding and soldering with one arm in cast would doubtless be incredibly difficult, so I took care of it for her, and the few other things that required two hands - transistor calibration and the like. As we put together the small device, I recognized it as a Quantum Light Amplification Stimulator, which, if I was not mistaken, was the idea we had tried on the 2,395th attempt. Nevertheless, I said nothing, and helped her create her idea. It was obvious by now that she had indeed grasped the creative spark that Phineas and I shared, and in no small degree. I didn't know how long it had been since she had last done anything of this sort, and would have hated to accidentally trigger withdrawing in her. Plus, it was kind of fun to watch her, and see just how much she seemed to be imitating our brother, even to the point of holding her screwdriver in that same backwards way that Phineas does.

When at last the small device was finished, I watched as she pressed the button on it, activating. I waited patiently as the small fizzling sound leaking from under the recently-sealed panels told the world that it was not going to work. Candace's shoulders slumped, and she leaned back took a deep breath. I had known that it was not going to work, or course, but I still couldn't help feeling a slight tinge of disappointment, even at the expected failure.

"Ferb, did you guys make a list of all the things you tried to make to get out of here?" I nodded, and dug into my pocket, producing my phone. Opening up the appropriate list, I tossed it to her. A few more seconds passed as she scrolled through the long, long list. Sighing as she reached the end of the list, she handed me back my phone.

"Do you have any new ideas?" she asked. I didn't. Phineas surely did, but it was just a matter of getting them out of him. Sooner or later, our brother would come across the right idea, and we'd be out of here. It was just a matter of time, really. I'm sure Phineas knew that, but I suppose he wasn't thinking that clearly right now.

"Tell me, Ferb, is it actually hopeless? Or is there still a way?" I didn't like the tone that had crept into her voice. It was stained with resignation. Surely she couldn't be giving up on us - or herself, now I suppose - so soon? What could I say? _Don't give up_? Yeah, that would work. Just as well as telling a drowning person _Don't drown_. But I had to say something - I could tell by her face that she wanted an answer. So I decided to go the vague route - avoiding complexities of things that I didn't fully know about, while still sounding inspiring in a round-a-bout way.

"If you don't give up hope, it can never be lost." Yay, me! I was making myself out to be some wise old man on a mountaintop. But the truth was - I didn't know when Phineas would eventually come upon the right idea, and to this day I don't really like speaking out on things of which I am unsure. Candace was also clearly unsatisfied with my question-dodging answer.

"That's so deep-sounding, but deep thoughts don't help rip space and time. Tell me straight and shallow: _do you actually think there is a way_?" I'd kind of talked (or not talked) myself into a corner. I didn't want to say _yes_ because, truthfully, I didn't know. I mean, I assumed that Phineas would happen on the right idea, but did I know for certain when that would happen, or even _if it would happen at all_? Nope. By the same token, I didn't want to say _no_ , because, well, that just sounds cruel. What kind of person flatly denies a chance at hope when it is offered? So, I said nothing.

"It's not so bad here, I guess. There's unlimited space and time and materials to do whatever we want - and its not like the people in reality will miss us. You guys aren't remembered at all, and I doubt I am - though it's possible that that creep still remembers me because he was so close to the rift when I fell in." I could just about taste the resignation in her voice.

It killed me because here was Candace, my sister, ready to just give up and accept living beyond existence for ever and ever? This conversation was even more deeply reinforcing my own homesickness. It was in that moment that I determined that I had to do something. Candace and I, we were both counting on our brother to churn out the idea that would bring us all back from the void. I had to help Phineas work through whatever was bothering him, and set him back on the straight and narrow. And I had to do it now. Tapping Candace on the shoulder to gain her attention, I gestured in the direction of the skyscraper, wanting to make sure that she'd be alright by herself - even if for just a little bit.

"I don't mind. I'll be fine." Her voice was laden with the sound of someone who knows full well that they are lying to themselves, but I took the hollow permission at its face value and pulled my phone back out. After all, if I could help Phineas come up with the right idea, then it would be better for all of us, Candace included. I opened the teleportation interface, and instantaneously was transported from the warehouse to the third story of the skyscraper.

Before opening the door, I paused and listened, seeing if I could hear anything out the ordinary - but no sound came. For a split second, the thought that Phineas could actually be sleeping came into my mind, but I instantly dismissed it. He'd had later nights and earlier days than last night by far, so it seemed highly unlikely that it was merely tiredness that had brought on this morning's outburst by the buffet. Thinking of the buffet made my stomach growl, reminding me that I too, needed to eat. With no more hesitation, I grabbed the door knob and swung the door open. I was not prepared for what I found within.

For a moment, I thought Phineas was withdrawing. He was rocking back and forth on his bed, hugging his knees to his chest, talking to himself in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. That was impossible, though. It had been less than twelve hours since Phineas and I had built something together, which was the absolute bare minimum amount of time that could pass before withdrawals started. Usually it was longer - on the order of eighteen to twenty-four hours. So, if he wasn't withdrawing, what was wrong?

"Phineas." I said. The mere act of me starting a conversation of my own accord was surprise enough to jar my brother out of his conversation with himself.

"Oh, hey Ferb." he replied, looking up as if he had just now realized that I had entered the room. I walked across the floor and sat next to him on the bed. He looked at me with a strange, crazed expression.

"I don't like this, Ferb." he said to me,"I don't like this one bit. I'm feeling how I did on that blasted island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It sucks, you know that? It's miserable."

Ah. Things were starting to make sense. Phineas was having a hard time coming up with a new way to rip the space-time continuum. I stood up and pulled the super-folded map out of my shirt pocket, and held it out to him. The whiteness of its backing was now stained with bean juice and blood, but my meaning was clear to my brother. But my good-intentioned gesture met with another unexpected outburst.

"I know! I know what you mean. 'Don't give up' and stuff like that. 'Where there's a will, there's a way'. But this is different, Ferb. Way different. On that island, I had ideas. Tons of them! But there were no materials on that island. Now, we have all the materials in the world except one and..." his voice trailed off. I shifted my position so that I was facing more directly towards him. I watched as he looked at the roof, then at the floor, then back at me.

"I have no ideas, Ferb." He took a huge breath.

"I did have ideas. You know that - I had six thousand three hundred and twenty odd ideas. And I thought that those, combined with yours, would surely contain the _right_ idea. But they didn't Ferb. They didn't." I didn't know what to say to this. What was my brother saying? That he was giving up? That he couldn't think of anything? It may sound strange that I couldn't at first understand him. But you have to look at it through my eyes: what Phineas was saying was so completely alien to me. He was right - even when were stranded on the small island, there had been ideas, just no things to manifest them with. But here, now, we had everything! Except Pizzazium, of course, which may as well have been nothing. My prolonged silence seemed to further upset Phineas, and he jumped up from the bed and grabbed my shoulders.

"I have no ideas! None! The well is dry, Ferb. The spring has been quenched. I...I..." His actions shocked me greatly, so much so that I couldn't even begin to articulate a response. His own shoulders shook heavily.

"I don't know how to do it. I just don't know how. No, that's not even right. I think, instead, that _it...can't...be...done_." The slow, halting words shattered like lightning into my consciousness, instantly bringing me out of my stunned silence. I had to say something, and say something now. But what?

"Nothing is impossible except impossibility." I said at last, quoting the same phrase that Phineas used so often. But whatever effect I had hoped it would incur, most definitely did not happen.

"Then I just don't know. I don't know! And I have no idea how it would be done. No idea. None. That Photovoltaic Neutronic Phaser Array was my last one. That was it. After that failed - no more came." His shoulders shook again, and he sat down on the bed again, leaning against my shoulder.

"I just don't know, Ferb. And that's scary."


	9. Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated

The late afternoon sun shone glaringly down from the sky, painting the ground with vast swaths of shadows and light. Not everyone in the Tri-State Area was taking time to enjoy the warm fall afternoon, however. Heinz Doofenshmirtz was one such person, grumbling to himself as he stood in his backyard pounding a on a metal plate with a large hammer. Having just spent the last four hours moping about in the mall while his teenage daughter dragged him to and fro, Heinz had been quite ready to get back into the yard and resume working on the recently-detonated Lawn-Mow-Inator. His progress had come to an abrupt halt, however, when he discovered, to his dismay, that his favorite screwdriver, the one with the red handle, was missing! Where could it have gone? He always kept it in the right front pocket of his lab coat, but it was now gone.

He had hunted up and down the small house, leaving no couch cushion unturned and no dresser unmoved. After a long and ultimately fruitless search, Heinz decided that the easiest way to find the screwdriver, wherever it had gone, would be with his own special brand of _science_. More specifically, a Screwdriver-Locate-Inator that would tell him exactly where the blasted thing had run off to. Scavenging bits of metal and wire from the failed Lawn-Mow-Inator, he set to work, slowly reshaping the singed metal into a new creation. As he worked, he heard the distinctive sound of a screen door swinging open behind him, and someone stepping out onto the small concrete square just outside of it. The footsteps were not loud and hollow-sounding, so there was only one person they could belong to.

"Dad, what are you doing?" his daughter asked from behind him, her voice putting an end to his mutterings.

"Oh, hi, Vanessa" he replied, turning around. "I'm making a..." Vanessa cut him off.

"Dad, you said you were going to make dinner, like twenty minutes ago. Why are you out here?"

She was right - he _had_ said that, but this was important. It was his favorite screwdriver, after all.

"I know I said that, honey, but listen, this is reeeally important to me. One of your visigoth friends" - "It's just _goth_ , Dad, how many times do I have to say that?" - "Sorry, one of your _goth_ friends took my screwdriver and I need to get it back!"

Vanessa cocked one eyebrow, clearly in disbelief. "One of _my_ friends took your tools? Dad, really?"

"No, I'm being serious! I swear on - on - that Tell-the-Truth-Inator I made that one time."

"Dad, your Truth-Inator was de _stroyed_. And besides, aren't you forgetting something? Like, dinner?"

Heinz thought for a moment. "Norm can make dinner!" he announced. "I really need to do this now. Who knows where my screwdriver is right now? It could be ... on the moon or something!"

"Dad, I doubt that any of my friends..." Vanessa was cut off by a loud monotone voice, as Norm the Robot spoke through the screen door.

"I WILL MAKE POTATO SALAD FOR DINNER!" he declared loudly.

"See, honey! Potato salad! Yum! Now, let me get back to work."

"Dad! I don't want potato salad for dinner. Especially not _his_."

"THAT HURTS ME VERY DEEPLY."

"Well, I'm sure there's something in the kitchen you can make, right?" Heinz picked up his hammer again. Every moment spent talking was a moment spent not finding his screwdriver. Vanessa sighed deeply and turned to go back inside. Suddenly, something occurred to him.

"Wait a second, honey, I need to ask you something." She rotated on her heel and raised her eyebrows again.

"What was that girl's name, anyways? I need to know - for my monologue."

"What girl?"

"The one who took - "

"Dad, honestly. I _really_ don't think any of my friends would take your tools."

"She did, I tell you! She took it and did something to her phone with it, and ... I don't know, sort of rambled on for a bit and ran off." Vanessa crossed her arms.

"Sort of rambled on? You know who that reminds me of? _You_."

"When I ramble, it's for a good reason! Now, come on, tell me her name."

"I don't know! You'll have to at least tell me what she looked like."

"Oh. Of course! Uh..." he racked his brain for details about the thieving girls' appearance. "Uh, her hair! It was the color of, uh, industrial orange marker dye!"

"Industrial ... Dad, seriously, can't you just say 'It was orange'?"

"Okay then, it was orange! Like, _really_ orange."

Vanessa rolled her eyes. "If she really _is_ somebody I know, then it'd have to be Candace Flynn. She'd be the only person I know with hair the color of ... _industrial orange marker dye_."

Heinz seized on the name. "Ah ha! Candace Flynn! Perfect! When I get ahold of Candace Flynn, I'll make her rue the day she - - - "

"YOU ARE NOT EVIL ANYMORE, SIR" came Norm's loud voice again, cutting off the monologue. Heinz paused and shifted on his feet.

"Oh, yeah. What I _meant_ was, When I get ahold of Candace Flynn, I'll ... ask nicely for her to give me my screwdriver back. Yes, that's what I meant."

"Okay, great monologue, Dad. Now are you going to make dinner or will I have to?"

Heinz hefted up his hammer again, preparing to continue working.

"Honey, I'd love to, but I really, really need that screwdriver back. It was my first one! It all started a long time ago when I was ... "

"Okay, whatever, Dad. I don't need the backstory." Vanessa turned and quickly disappeared into the house.

"It wasn't a backstory!" Heinz yelled after her. He paused. "What if I was going to say... that we could go back to the mall?!"

"Were you?" she yelled back.

Defeated, Heinz readied his hammer and resumed his pounding. The Screwdriver-Locate-Inator was going to be finished soon, and then he'd get his screwdriver back. And maybe take over the _entire Tri-State Area_! Well, just the former, really. But it _was_ fun to think about.

The sun slowly slid under the horizon as he worked away. The moon rose, and stars began appearing in the darkened sky. As he tightened the final sprocket on the inator's self-destruct panel, the streetlights came on, and the windows of nearby homes began to glow warmly. The backyard was lit by the light of his own dining room window, beckoning him in for a meal, or at least a snack. But he stayed resolute - that screwdriver would be found before he rested that night. He supposed that it was maybe a bit of an overreaction for a piece of plastic and metal, but still, there were plenty of good reasons. His backstory had been laden with emotional trauma and plenty of justification for his seemingly extreme response. Just as the clock hit 7:30 PM, he finished. There was no one else in the yard, but that didn't stop him from softly ' _behold!_ '-ing under his breath.

It was a fine piece of machinery, if he did say so himself. Taking care to give the self-destruct button a wide berth, he pressed the green button on the back of the inator. The long, pointed nozzle at the end glowed slightly red, and then a thick beam of red light shot from it, arcing up into the sky. The small screen on the back of the inator filled with symbols and letters as the device systematically scanned the _entire Tri-State Area!_ for his stolen tool. A few moments passed, and Heinz paced about in the backyard carelessly, waiting impatiently on his device. Then, _bing_! It had found found the screwdriver! He quickly returned to his post by the output screen and read the information it contained.

The screwdriver was about ten miles away - roughly to the southeast of him, with coordinates of about 47 degrees north and 103 degrees west. Cross-referencing a map of Danville, he pinpointed the small neighborhood of Arbor Estates as the point in question. A more precise notation of the tools current position was 47°12'07.9"N 103°15'25.0"W, which allowed him to accurately mark down one of the houses in the neighborhood as the correct one.

Now he knew where his screwdriver was. The only question remaining was whether or not he should head there _now_ or tomorrow. Tomorrow was Monday, and would be the first day of public school in Danville. Trying to drive across town in the morning would most likely be an insufferable nightmare. So it was settled then. Heinz pulled a switch to turn off the inator, and headed inside.

"Whew!" he muttered to himself, opening the back door, "I hadn't realized how chill it was getting out there." He crossed the dining room and walked through the short hallway to his daughter's room.

"Vanessa, honey," he called through the door. There was no answer.

"DO YOU NEED SOMETHING, SIR?" the loud voice shattered the otherwise quiet atmosphere in the small home.

"Norm, you ... ugh, whatever. Look, I'm going out for a bit. I'll be home soon, alright?"

"WHERE ARE YOU GOING, SIR?"

"It's none of your business!"

"ARE YOU GOING TO GET YOUR SCREWDRIVER BACK?"

"I said ... well, whatever. Yes, yes I am. Can I go now?" he edged his way past the metal body of the robot and began walking towards the front door, stopping only briefly to snag up his keys on the way out.

The ride from his house to Arbor Estates was a short one. Along the way, Heinz practiced his speech in the car's rear view mirror. He had given up evil, but this wasn't evil, was it? He was just going to get back what was rightfully his. He hadn't sworn any vengeance or made any threats, but old habits die hard.

"Hi, my name is Candace Flynn and I steal screwdrivers for fun." he said, in a mocking, high-pitched tone.

"Candace Flynn, give me my screwdriver back now ... please." he replied to himself in his normal voice.

"What? Never!"

"Yes! Give it to me now!"

"You can't make me!"

Even in his imaginary conversation, he felt himself losing.

"Give it back now or I'll - I'll banish you from this plane of reality!" He smacked himself on the forehead.

" _Dummkoph_! That's evil, I can't do that." He aggressively honked at the slow moving red truck in front of him. Being good was so much harder than being evil. There were so many things you had to mind, and things you couldn't do. At first, it had been easy. The first few hours - first few days, even - after he had made up his mind to switch sides had come easily. He'd pulled out of L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N., sold his old apartment, gotten rid of the old evil inators, and moved across town in a rush of single-minded focus unusual for him. His daughter was growing up, and if he wanted to spend time with her, and support her in the path she wanted to take in life, then evil would have to go. That didn't necessarily mean it was easy, however. As time had worn on, he'd allowed himself to return to inator building, reasoning that as long as they weren't strictly evil, they'd probably be okay.

The first strictly non-evil inator he'd made, a Garage-Door-Silent-Inator, had earned him a disapproving visit from Perry the Platypus. There had been a long one-sided conversation, and he had eventually convinced the secret agent to let him be, so long as he avoided doing evil. As a plus, his garage door was now completely silent. Being able to build inators had been a great help, but he still occasionally would catch himself ready to do something evil. The constant hand wringing, for example, was a habit that was proving extraordinarily difficult to shake. Heinz supposed that wringing his hands wasn't necessarily _evil_ , but it was usually associated with evil, so he'd decided to try to quit anyway. Evil had been a huge part of his life for so long - trying to just up and quit like he was not as easy at it may seem.

"Bah! Who needs evil anyway. Not me." the sudden outburst helped drive away his previously introspective thoughts. Maybe he should build a No-Introspection-Inator. Heinz turned on the radio, scowling, to see what was playing.

"Welcome to our eight o'clock Radio Yoga Hour! Now, we..." With a _fzzt_ , he spun the tuner dial until only static came from the car speakers.

"Yoga teachers. Hate 'em." Ever since that one fateful day so many years ago, yoga teachers had earned a high spot on his long list of 'Hates'. He had sworn vengeance on them, a vengeance which it seemed he'd never actually get to visit. But just because there would be no fiery rain of wrath, there was no reason he had to listen to the fools flaunt their stupidly high flexibility on the radio. He listened to the static the rest of the way to Arbor Estates, making up his own lyrics to blend with the constant background noise.

At last, he pulled up outside a small, yellow, two-story home on Maple Drive. Checking his phone, he knew that this was the place. His screwdriver was here, somewhere. Now it was just a matter of getting it back. His first instinct was to construct a Screwdriver-Attractinator that would forcibly rip it from wherever it was and pull it back to him, but he grudgingly scrapped that idea in favor of something more... _socially acceptable_. Bleh.

"Oh, Vanessa," he muttered under his breath as he got out of the small car, "You'll never know what I do for you." But though his tone was bitter, it directed more at himself than at his daughter.

Heinz walked up the driveway, and about halfway up it, got a nasty surprise in the form of stepping in a huge patch of wet paint.

"Who paints their driveway?!" he exclaimed to no one in particular. Sidestepping twice out of the gooey patch, he saw with sinking heart that the bottoms of his shoes were hopelessly stained.

"Candace Flynn, the stealer of screwdrivers and stainer of shoes," he muttered. A strange scent wafted through the air. He sniffed twice before he could label it. It was the smell of combusted long-chain hydrocarbons (the names of which he could not pronounce), as one might find at a rocket launch site. It was a bit odd that it would be here, in a suburban driveway, but he had no doubt as to the veracity of his conclusions. Walking the rest of the short distance up to the front door of the house, leaving painted shoe prints in his wake, he prepared to knock on the door and directly confront the thief.

Instead, he was interrupted again. A familiar footstep sounded behind him.

"Perry the Platypus?" he asked, without even turning around. "What are you doing here?"

He turned around, and saw the small, teal agent standing disapprovingly behind.

"What?" he said defensively. "I'm not doing evil. Look, a girl who lives here, well, I think she lives here stole my screwdriver, and I've come to get it back." He paused. Here was a great point to begin a monologue. Clearing his throat, he launched off with gusto. This was going to be just like the old days.

"It all started a long time ago, when I was ... well, about the same age as now actually. It wasn't even that long ago really, just this afternoon. Anyway, I was doing entirely non-evil science and some orange-haired girl shows up at my door and rambles on about my Do-Over-Inator, which you know I destroyed, and about her brothers or something. She had this picture, and I don't know. It was all pretty sketchy stuff, honestly. Anyway, I had on my other lab coat, you know, the _other_ one, and I had my favorite screwdriver in it, and she just snatched it up and messed around inside her phone with it, then shoves her phone in my face and runs off yelling about the moon. The whole thing was quite strange, you know." The secret agent was looking at him, face marked with disbelief.

"Come on!" he protested. "It's true, I swear it. I don't even know how you got here so fast. I didn't even bring an inator with me - I really _am_ just going to knock on the door and ask for it back."

The platypus pointed to the wet paint tracked across the driveway from his shoes.

"What? I didn't do that! It's not my fault the weirdos who live here painted their driveway at all, and without putting up a 'Wet Paint' sign, no less. I'm no common vandal."

When it looked as if Perry didn't believe him, Heinz backtracked just a few feet to the edge of the patch of wet paint.

"Look, Perry the Platypus. See? You can hardly see the paint at all in this dark, but it was definitely here before I was."

The secret agent eventually relented. If nothing else, it was fairly obvious that the paint was not Heinz's doing. But when Heinz attempted to go back to the front door, Perry jumped in front of him.

"What is it?" he asked exasperatedly. "Can't you just let me get up there and ask for my screwdriver back? It's not evil at all, I mean, come on!"

The platypus rolled his eyes and motioned with hands to _stay here_. He then quickly ran around the side of the house.

"Oh, yeah." Heinz said,"It's not okay for me to just knock on the door, but you get to run in like you own the place." He crossed his arms, and leaned against a wall of the house, waiting for the secret agent's return. "It's not like you _live_ here, Perry the Platypus. But whatever."

A few moments later, Perry returned, and lo and behold, in his hand was a screwdriver. But not any screwdriver - _the_ screwdriver! Heinz jumped forward and snatched up the small tool, all previous complaints instantly forgotten.

"So, that dastardly orange-haired thief does live here? Ooh, she'd better be glad I'm not evil anymore. I'd ... I'd ... I don't know. But it would have something to do with screwdrivers, and it'd be _so_ evil. Just the thought gives me the shivers."

Perry pointed back to the car, clearly telling him to be gone. Just why Perry was so adamant that he not knock on the door and see these people for himself was a bit of a mystery in its own right. But whatever. He had what he came for, after all.

"Alright, alright! I'm leaving. Relax!"

Heinz walked through the grass, not feeling at all guilty at any paint he may or may not have left on their front lawn. Teach them to not put up a 'Wet Paint' sign. He stripped off his shoes, and tossed them in the trunk of his car, then climbed in the driver's seat. Starting up the engine, he turned the car around, and drove off down the street.

The rest of the night passed uneventfully enough. When he got home, he discovered that Vanessa had retired to bed early, no doubt in preparation for school tomorrow. Norm had powered down for the night, and all the lights were out. Well, there was no point in staying up by himself. Without any evil schemes to plan, his nights had become increasingly early and mornings increasingly later. He didn't particularly like it, but what was one to do? Maybe he could get a job somewhere. He didn't need money - the monthly alimony checks he received easily covered all of his small household's needs; especially now since he wasn't pouring a large amount of into evil.

He went under his bed and slid out a box in which was his old Evil Science textbook. There was no chapter on how to _not_ be evil, of course, but he had had an idea. The school year was starting again tomorrow, and surely they could use highly-skilled teachers? Heinz knew his Evil Science book from cover to cover. He'd have to get rid of the 'Evil' from it, of course, but that would be easy enough. Picking up a black marker, he scribbled over the offending word on the cover. Well, that should do it. Placing the  ~~Evil~~ Science book on his nightstand he crawled under the covers and turned out his light.

* * *

The morning after, he was roused bright and early by the sounds of pots and pans clanging together in the kitchen. Yawning, he climbed out of bed, dressed, and walked into the living room.

"Good morning, Vanessa," he called into the hallway.

"GOOD MORNING SIR! I HAVE MADE SOME EGGS!"

Eugh. Norm's eggs were disgusting. Heinz wrinkled up his nose at the thought and steered a course away from the kitchen and into his daughter's room. For a moment he watched her packing up her backpack.

"Do you have everything?" he asked.

"Yes, Dad," Vanessa answered with a small sigh. She scooped up her pack and stood up.

"I can drive you to school, you know?" he offered for what had to be the thirtieth time.

"No, Dad." she replied, sighing again. "I'd _much_ rather ride on the bus."

"Okay then." The answer was disappointing, though by now well expected. His baby girl was growing up way too fast for him. Thoughts of a Visit-The-Past-Inator flashed through his head, but he shoved them out. Time travel to the past was almost guaranteed to cause a paradox of some sort, and thoughtlessly causing temporal continuity errors was something evil people did, and he wasn't evil. Not anymore.

He hovered around Vanessa for next ten or so minutes, until she grew fed up with him and departed for the school bus stop, only barely able to convince him to stay home.

"Well, Norm," he said, turning back into the house after closing the front door behind her, "She'll be back in two weeks, I guess."

Walking past the kitchen, rejecting for a second time the offer of shell-laden scrambled eggs, Heinz returned to the backyard, where last night's Screwdriver-Locate-Inator still stood. It had served its purpose well, and was no longer needed.

"Alright, grass." he said to the empty yard. "I've got my screwdriver, a pile of parts, and an empty afternoon. This time, you're going _down_! I'm going to mow _the entire Tri-Yard Area_! Front, side, and back! No mercy will be shown! In just a little bit of time!" Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his screwdriver and set to taking the Screwdriver-Locate-Inator apart. The morning flew along as he dismantled the inator. By the time he was done, the sun was far above the horizon, in that position which one would probably describe as 'early afternoon'.

The Lawn-Mow-Inator 2 was very nearly completed and the clock was reading around three in the afternoon when a strange sound caught his attention. It sounded somewhat like a wet paper ball being squeezed very tightly. Heinz temporarily stopped working on the inator and looked around for whatever could have caused such an unearthly sound. Then - he saw a alien blue light glow from the other side the backyard's tall wooden fence. A moment later, and someone walked _through_ the fence, passing through the solid wood as though it wasn't even there. It was Rodney. Heinz scowled at this sudden appearance of his old rival.

"Ha! Doofenshmirtz!" Rodney called out, seeing Heinz standing in the middle of the yard."Would you look at what I've got here? Nice, hm?" And he waved a small remote-looking gadget in the air.

"Rodney," he scowled back "Who'd you steal _that_ from?"

"Don't call me that! It's not my name! I'm Aloyse-"

"I really don't care, you know that?" Rodney's high-pitched voice grated on his ears as he cut the man off from fully rattling out his long list of middle names.

Rodney walked towards him. "Whatcha doing?" he lilted out. "Anything eeevil?"

Heinz narrowed his eyes. "I told you - I've given up evil."

"Yes, yes I know. For your _daughter_. I do so love having a son who is as interested in evil and as smart as Orville." The mocking tone did not sit well with Heinz.

"Oh, shut up! Vanessa could easily be evil, she just wants to do other things. And I intend to support her, no matter what she chooses."

"Mmm hmm."

Rodney drew near to the work in progress Lawn-Mow-Inator.

"Back off!" said Heinz, putting out his arm in an effort to stop him. Instead, his hand went straight through the man as if he wasn't even there.

"Oh ho, you like that? It's a quantum rambler!"

"You mean quantum _scrambler_ , you buffoon."

"Yes, well, whatever. The main point is, it's _mine_! And you'll never get it from me."

"Why do you think I'd even try to take your stupid gadget? I could make one of my own, if I wanted. You probably had to steal that one because you can't make anything." Rodney's eyes narrowed, then he threw back his head and laughed.

"What's so funny? Did you come over here purely to antagonize me? And how did you even find out where I live now?"

"But of course I did," Rodney crooned. "You must know that despite whatever craziness _you're_ up to, _I'm_ still evil."

Heinz rolled his eyes. "You couldn't even _start_ to be evil without stealing inventions from other people. Now, you used to steal from _me_ , but I never made anything of that sort. So tell me, whose idea did you rip off this time?"

"Oh, nobody. Just some orange-headed brat who didn't have the brains to see a trap when it basically smacked her in the face."

"Orange - you mean Dr. Santiago? She made _that_?"

"What? No, it wasn't anyone at L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N. - it was just some girl."

"Some girl?" Heinz cocked his eyebrow in disbelief. "Yeah, right."

"Oh, but it was!" Rodney saw an opportunity to gloat and seized upon it. "It was great actually. Her psyche was like Play-Doh in my supremely skilled hands."

"Supremely skilled? You? I don't know which part I disbelieve in more."

"Heinz, please. You are truly standing the presence of a master manipulator."

" _That_ part is true, at least," Heinz snorted. "Underwater welder, you." Rodney ignored him and began a long spiel on the subject of his own greatness.

"It's a tale for the ages. I came, I saw, and I took. Poor Candace Gertrude Flynn, such as she was, was no match for my superior wit. I only-"

"Hang on, hang on, hang on" Heinz interrupted. "Did you say that her name was _Candace Flynn_?"

"Yes? That's - wait a second. How do you know that name?"

Heinz smiled condescendingly. "That's for me to know and you to _never_ find out."

But the tone of Rodney's voice had changed. "I don't understand!" he said. "I banished her to a non-dimension! Doesn't the Theory of Discrete Space-time state that anything beyond spacetime is erased from existence, regardless of time and space?"

"You did _what_?"

"Banished! To a non-dimension. How can you still remember her? That should be impossible."

Heinz's condescending smile returned. "I can see you don't truly understand the Theory of Discrete Space-time. Perhaps your brilliant son should explain to you the concept of quantum locking someday. Or can you just manipulate him to tell you? I'm more interested in how you opened a rift to a non-dimension on your own anyway. Or did she do that too?"

Rodney scowled. "Blast!" he spat. "I knew I should've just killed her, I knew it. Stupid conceptual fabric of spacetime."

"Hah!" Heinz laughed at the other man's anger. "It really was stupid of you to banish her anyway. With her gone, how do you intend to get more gadgets? You certainly won't get them from _me_."

"Oh, shut up!" Rodney exclaimed. "I'll just... I'll just build another space-time ripper and bring her back. That can't be that difficult, right?"

"Oh, for sure. There's a reason that spacetime can't be ripped without Pizzazium Infinionite, but it's certainly not because it's difficult. It's just the easiest thing in the world to literally tear the very base of all existence. You just keep thinking that."

Rodney's overbearing, pompous attitude had drained away now that he realized what situation he was actually in.

"Shut up." he repeated, then turned and darted away, disappearing through the backyard fence.

"Underwater welder!" Heinz yelled after him, though he didn't know if Rodney even heard him.

Rolling his eyes, he turned back to his inator, when a loud grumbling and pang of hunger told that he'd better eat instead. As he headed inside, he found huge bowl of potato salad sitting on the dining room table - courtesy of a certain android. Spooning some into a more appropriately-sized dish, Heinz sat down at the table and pulled out his phone. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, which meant that Vanessa would be out of school. On a whim, he texted her and asked about her friend, intent on seeing if Rodney had _really_ banished her beyond spacetime, or if that had just been more hot air, of which the man certainly had plenty.

_Did you have a good first day at school?_

A few moments passed, and she texted back.

_Yeah._

_Did your mom pick up you up?_

_Yeah._

_What happened there?_

_Stuff. Look, Dad, I'm kinda busy right now.  
_

_So about your friend Candace Flynn?_

_Who?_

_Candace Flynn._

_I don't know anybody by that name._

_You sure?_

_Yup. Look, I've really got to go. Talk later._

Well, that settled it. He had _actually_ done it, which was a bit impressive. Honestly, if that girl hadn't have been quantum-locked in relationship to him, Rodney would have probably gotten away with it. Heinz rolled his eyes. That Do-Over-Inator really had been a huge mistake to make. Of all the inators to facilitate his short-lived takeover of the Tri-State Area, it had to have been the one that also tore reality so bad it had had to be immediately be destroyed. His reign as Tri-Governor had been brief, but at least he had experienced the feeling of rule. Of course, he was determined that the new path he had chosen to set himself on was the right one to choose, but that wasn't going to prevent him griping about it.

As he slowly ate his potato salad, he thought about what Rodney had said about sending that girl to a non-dimension. Hadn't that girl said that she had brothers, who had gotten sucked there as well, although entirely by accident as a result of the Do-Over-Inator's malfunctions?

"Serves her right," he muttered, "Messing with a scientist's stuff." But the vindictive statement didn't reflect his true inner feeling.

"Bah!" he said, become agitated, "being evil is so much easier than this. When I was evil, I didn't introspect myself half this much." Shoving his now-empty plate across the table, he stood up from his chair and stretched.

"Welp, that Lawn-Mow-Inator's not gonna build itself, I guess." Before he could take another step, the doorbell rang.

"Oh, great. Who is it this time? Can't a man build a reality-breaking device without all this bother when he destroys it?" Nevertheless, he moved the chair aside, and shuffled through the house to the front door. Where was Norm? That junk pile was never around when he was needed. The doorbell rang again.

"I'm coming!" Heinz yelled. He muttered in German under his breath as he spun the deadbolt and swung the door open. On his porch stood a woman, with a red shirt and white pants. The most striking feature of her appearance however, was her brilliantly orange hair, falling at least half way down her back, so bright it could only be described with only four words - _industrial orange marker dye_.

"Hi," the woman said. "I'm Candace Flynn." Heinz's shoulders slumped even more than their usual slouch.

"What?" he said in a flat, disbelieving voice.

"It's true." she replied. "Look, I can take a DNA test or something if you want proof, assuming there's still traces of original me around here."

"You're not making any sense!" he exclaimed. "You were just here yesterday, but as a little girl. Rodney banished you to a non-dimension, and now you come back as an adult. You stopped your time machine at the year, lady."

"Banished to a non-dimension, hm?" she intoned. "I suppose that could explain it. Kind of surprising it has nothing to do with time travel."

"What on _earth_ are you on about?" asked Heinz.

"Oh, it's nothing really. Just past experience. You wouldn't know."

"No, no I wouldn't. What I would like to know, however, is what is going on with you. I'm starting to regret the day Vanessa met you." The woman - apparently Candace Flynn - smiled.

"I'm not _that_ Candace." she replied. "Technically, I'm not anything. I'm a quantum anomaly that that Candace and her brothers created accidentally during time travel. I usually go by Good Future Candace - because I came from the quote unquote 'good future', as opposed to my counterpart, Bad Future Candace, who no longer exists."

"You're a quantum anomaly?" Heinz asked. "I guess... that _could_ kind of explain how you are still here after Rodney banished you." Despite himself, it _was_ kind of intriguing.

"Yup. At first it was pretty bad, but after a while I got used to it. My drivers license says - or used to say - Candace Flin, with an I-N instead of Y-N-N. I'd pretty much established a new, ordinary life here, though you wouldn't _believe_ the nightmare I went through with the government to get ahold of that and like, my I.D. and stuff, what with having no parents and no birth date and no country of origin."

"So, what do you want with me?"

"Well,just last week, on Wednesday specifically, the entire space-time continuum shifted. Because of my status as temporal anomaly, I remained outside of the shift, of course, but the course of time was changed drastically. It changed again just a few hours ago, but by then the damage was already done. The new life I had rebuilt for myself was instantly gone, and when I did some research, I discovered that it changed to allow for a past, present, and future where my original self's brothers do not exist. A handful of other things ceased to exist as well, but they had much lesser effect on the continuum. Things like spoons, you know."

"Oh, I know." Heinz replied. He'd had to make all the spoons in his house from scratch, which, while not being that hard, had been more annoying that it should have been. "So how did you find me and what do you want?"

"Well, mainly because I want to bust my brothers." She flashed a smile.

"What?" Would the confusing gibberish never end? Could any versions of Candace Flynn speak normally?

"Oh, nothing. Seriously, though, because I want my life back. Not my original life - I _know_ I can't have that back, but at least the second one I built up before the space-time continuum shifted again."

"And why do you think I could help you? If you truly are a quantum anomaly, couldn't you disappear at any moment if something questions your existence?"

"Well, yeah. But let's keep that on the down-low, okay? As to the first part of the question, it was really quite simple. You _are_ a scientist, right? I knew Vanessa like ten years ago, and I remembered her mentioning that her dad was, like, a mad scientist or something. It never really seemed important to me until a few days ago, when I began putting effort into finding you."

"Okay, first of all, I was never a _mad_ scientist. I was an _evil_ scientist, and now I'm not even that anymore. And secondly, you knew my daughter _ten years_ ago? When she was _six_?" Candace smiled again.

"Time travel. Remember, Doc? Crazy stuff."

"Don't call me that. My name is Heinz. And yes, I get it now."

"Cool. So, will you help me?"

"Help you how?"

"You heard what I said. We need to re-shift the spacetime continuum back to the way it was so I can get my life back. To do that, we need to make my original self's brother's exist again. And my original self, I guess?"

"Do you have any idea what trying to do that will take? Like, Rodney banished you beyond space and time. An inator to just straight-up _open_ a hole into the non-dimension, well, I don't know if it can be done."

"Trust me, Heinz. I have far less knowledge about this stuff than you. If you can't do it, well, can you point me to someone who can?"

Heinz huffed. "Apparently your original self can." he pointed out. Candace seemed shocked.

"What? That's impossible. It was probably her brothers. They were always doing crap like that. Drove me nutty. Never could get them for it though."

"I don't know." he replied. "Rodney specifically stated that he stole a quantum scrambler from, and I quote: _an orange-headed brat so stupid she wouldn't recognize a trap if it smacked her in the face_." Candace's face twisted up.

"That's mean."

"The man _is_ evil. Bad at it, yes, and far to pompous for his own good, also yes, but evil nonetheless."

"Well, if you trust him, I guess."

"Pfft. Trust him? That's like trusting a health fanatic cook. Which is to say, I don't. At all."

"Well, whatever. Will you help me or not?"

"Hmm. If you come in, I'll scan you with a Quantum-Displace-Inator to see if you really are anomaly. If you are, then I suppose I can try. Can't hurt anyway."

"That won't...?"

"Cause you to cease to exist? Nah. Come on." He motioned into the small living room, and pointed at the little brown couch. She walked in and sat down.

"Gimme one second." he said, closing and locking the front door and disappearing into his own bedroom. Opening the closet, he hunted around for the desired gadget. At last finding it in one of the boxes stacked in the closet, he returned to the waiting woman. Pressing a button, the small device booted up, and the screen flickered to life. A few moments of scanning determined that, as far as space and time were concerned, this woman did not exist. So she was indeed a quantum anomaly. Well, whaddaya know. Dropping the device on the small coffee table, he plopped down on the couch next to her.

"So. You want to rip space and time and gain access to whatever non-dimension lies outside of it. Have you got any idea of the sort stuff I'll need to build an inator of that caliber?"

"None at all." she replied cheerfully. Oh, well, that was great.

"Well, it certainly won't be _easy_ \- or cheap. The single most expensive item I can think of off the top of my head is Pizzazium Infinionite. It usually goes for around sixty-five thousand dollars a gram, and I'd say we'll need about ... eh ... maybe five?"

"Sixty-five _thousand_ dollars?" Her tone was incredulous.

"Mmm hmm. More than solid diamond, gram for gram. It _is_ the most least common element, after all, and pretty nearly impossible to synthesize."

"Well, I _had_ some money, but when the continuum shifted, all my bank accounts were wiped, of course. All I've got is the stuff in my wallet. Uh, let me check." She pulled out a small wallet and opened it, producing a small wad of cash. Flipping through it, she at last laid it out on the coffee table.

"Forty-five dollars."

"Great. That'll buy about seven ten-thousandths of a gram of pizzazium."

"A single footstep, right?" Heinz sighed.

"Look, I'd like to help you, mostly just to get you and all of your other selves out of my hair for good, but since I'm not evil not anymore, I really don't have any way of getting the pizzazium you need. When I built the Do-Over-Inator, it only needed a half a gram of the stuff, which was still an obscene amount of money. What you need requires _ten times_ that amount."

Candace didn't answer immediately, choosing instead to sit quietly while sweeping the room with her eyes.

"You said that somebody named Rodney was the one who banished my original self? How'd he do that? Can't you use what he did?" Heinz mulled over the idea.

"I don't know. It _might_ work, but we'd have to go visit his lab. Rodney hates me - and I him! the idea-stealing scoundrel is a poor excuse for true evil."

"Well? Do you know where his lab is?"

"You seem awfully eager to go skulking around and do this stuff."

"Well yeah, I mean, I _am_ a quantum anomaly. There's literally no other reason for my continued existence other than the fickle nature of spacetime. I've rebuilt my life once already, and I don't want to have to do it again."

"Well..." Heinz paused. He knew where Rodney's lab was well enough, but it was right next door to the main L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N. lab, which he'd never really thought he'd have to see again after so abruptly leaving it. On the other hand, however, if he went along with this crazy woman, he could finally rid himself of all the Candace Flynns and their craziness. Also, it did seem an awfully non-evil thing to do. Maybe this would be good for him - a sort of first taste of going out of his way to help somebody completely unrelated to him. Ugh, being good was _so hard_.

"I'm such a _dummkoph_ for going along with this," he muttered to himself, pulling himself up off the couch. Turning back to Candace, he spoke aloud.

"Come on. I can't say for sure how well this will work, but I guess we might as well try."

Candace sprang up off the couch.

"Awesome. I was hoping you'd say that, honestly - I really have nowhere else to go."

Heinz scooped up his car keys and led the way to the garage, the door sliding open silently. Something strange caught his eye - crouching the bushes in his front yard was _yet another_ red-shirt wearing, orange-haired woman. As soon as she saw them open the garage and get into his car, she jumped out and ran off, through his neighbor's side yard.

"Oh, and who was _that_?" he said exasperatedly.

"Oh, don't worry about her. That was a slightly younger of version of me who would have failed to convince you to help had I not come from like twenty minutes in the future and told her to let me handle it."

"Wait, let me get this straight. You tried to convince me, failed, used a time machine to go back, and try again, and got it on the second time?"

"On the forty-third time, actually, but that's pretty much the gist of it. Of all the stupid and annoying things my original self's brother's did, that museum time machine actually came in pretty handy. It was super nasty though - there was dried blood like, spilled all over it for some reason."

"I _don't_ need to know this," Heinz grumbled, starting up the car and pulling out of the driveway. What in world had he gotten himself into this time?

The drive through town was silent. Heinz stared out the windshield, and Candace offered no conversation, instead sitting quietly in the passenger seat. He turned the radio dial until he alighted on a song he liked, and the quiet music filled the car, easily replacing the lack of conversation. He drove through downtown Danville, avoiding the highway near the sports stadium, quite passively until he reached the industrial district of the city which housed the warehouses that happened double as laboratories for a handful of evil scientists.

Just a few short days ago, he had left this place for what he thought was going to be the last time, and now, lo and behold, here he was - coming back. One thing was for sure, he determined, if he ever got this mess straightened out, he was _never_ going to build another time-warping inator again. They were far more trouble than they were worth. Of course, the whole situation could have been avoided if Candace Flynn (the _other_ Candace Flynn) hadn't turned on the Do-Over-Inator that day in his lab. The thing was a prototype for a reason, after all.

He seriously considered the idea of forbidding Vanessa to see Candace Flynn, any Candace Flynn, again after today. Heinz had had more than enough of these orange-haired girls and their quantum mechanical issues. A large part of the reason he was even going along with this one was just so they would quit bothering him. Of course, getting back at Rodney somewhat nice as well, although he decided that since that sounded kind of evil, it was totally not any part of his motivation for doing this. At last, they arrived at correct warehouse. Heinz drove past it just a little ways, and parked his car in the alleyway between two other warehouses farther up the street.

"Is this the place?" Candace asked, peering out the window, somewhat unconvinced.

"No," he replied,"It's just a bit back that way." He jerked his thumb back at the correct warehouse.

"Is it because he's evil? He has to hide from the law, or whatever?"

"No. The police won't try to stop evil people - they handle bad people. Evil is OWCA's jurisdiction."

"What?"

"It's complicated. Come on." Heinz climbed out of the car and started walking away. Candace quickly followed suit. He kept a watchful eye on the few workers scattered about the other warehouses, but they all seemed pretty normal to him. After just a very short walk, they reached the entrance of the correct building.

"Hidden Rising Tower Warehouse, Incorporated," Candace read off the giant sign posted on the front of the building. "Is there _actually_ a hidden rising tower in there?" The question was an ill-conceived attempt at jest, obviously, but Heinz was in no laughing mood.

"There w _as_ ," he answered seriously, "But I don't know if Rodney took it out or not. Probably did. He'd hate to have to see something that I built in his precious laboratory."

"Oh. So, uh, how do we know if this Rodney guy is here or not? Do you have any like, gadgets for finding people or something?" Heinz rolled his eyes. He glanced around, and didn't see any trace of Rodney's hideous white van anywhere around on the street.

"I don't think he's here," he said, stepping up to the large front door and giving it a pull. It didn't budge.

"Well, the door is locked." she remarked, pulling on the handle. "Isn't there any other way to get inside?"

Heinz sighed at the question. Really, he should have seen this coming.

"Look, I really shouldn't even be down here. I'm not evil anymore. Going into somebody else's lab - even if they thoroughly deserve it - isn't something that good people do."

For a moment, Candace was silent. Then, she spoke again.

"Well, you keep saying how Rodney is evil. If that's true, then aren't you actually doing good by helping reverse the evil he did? The ends justify the means, and all such as that."

Heinz squinted at her. "That's a pretty feeble attempt at convincing me to go against the promise that I made to my daughter." he pointed out. Candace smiled.

"Well, _that_ doesn't bother me. I can just re-use the museum time machine again and again, until I happen upon the right thing to say to you." Heinz groaned.

"Maybe _you_ should take up evil," he said sarcastically. "You're proving to be pretty good driving people up the wall. I wasn't a mad scientist before, but I swear I'll probably be one before I get done with you."

"Sorry," Candace shrugged. "That's my life as a temporal anomaly. Can't let stuff get in my way - You wouldn't understand."

"And I don't even want to."

"So, will you help me get in there or not?" Heinz sighed again.

"Weeeell, if you have basically unlimited retries with your time machine..."

"I do."

"And I suppose that I would be helping your brothers in some degree by bringing them back into existence..."

"They aren't _my_ brothers, anymore. But yes, you would."

Heinz ran his hand through his hair. Was he really about to do this?

"Yeah, sure. Whatever. But once we finish, I swear you better not mess with time again. And if you do, well, don't come crying to me. I've had about all I can take with you."

"That's fine with me," she answered. "So, how are we gonna get in there?"

Heinz turned and looked at the warehouse, shaking his head.

"There's a back door that's broken. It doesn't latch - and unless it's been fixed or barricaded or something, we should be able to get in through there."

"Awesome. We won't even have to force our way through anything."

"Can you _not_?" he asked.

"Sorry. My bad."

The two of them walked through the alley next to the warehouse. Sure enough, behind the building, a single door was placed. There was no knob, but the door yielded easily and swung inwards when it was pushed. Heinz felt about the wall, until he found the switch. Faint electrical crackling filled the air, and old, decaying light bulbs flickered several times before coming on, illuminating the interior of the building with a dim yellow glow.

Immediately they were both taken aback by the state of the place. A huge scorch mark stained the middle of the floor, charring the concrete black. Bits of blackened metal and plastic where lying about, as if thrown by some great explosion. In the very middle of the burn mark, a terribly burnt metal heap lay. He recognized it as an inator of some sort.

Drawing near, he kicked aside a loose panel, and studied what was left of the wiring beneath after what had apparently been a terrible self-destruction. Even though most of the wires were melted together, and the processing chips were basically destroyed, Heinz was still able to identify it.

"This was the space-time ripper," he said to Candace, his voice echoing in the empty space.

"Nice. Can you fix it?" Heinz raised his eyebrows in disbelief.

"You really know nothing about mechanics, do you?" She shook her head.

"No, I can't _fix_ it. Look at it! It's completely destroyed. Looks like it self-destructed or something. I'll have to make a completely new one. You'd better hope that there's some pizzazium and stuff lying around in here."

Heinz left the pile of what was now only useful as scrap metal in the middle of the floor and walked over to a row of tables set up at the other end of the warehouse's empty floor. His eyes ran over the assorted supplies lying on them. There was quite a bit of stuff lying around, but was it enough? Hm. There was an ionization matrix, and a phosphorescent proton manifold, and neucleonic particle revaporator. There were even two grams of pizzazium infinionite. But there was no electron vein conduit tubing or ion stabilization reintegrater. And two grams of pizzazium was less than half of what a space-time ripper would require.

"Sorry," he said at last, turning away from the table. "There just isn't enough stuff left to build another ripper." Candace's face morphed into a frown.

"What's missing? she asked.

"Not much - just a handful of particle reimbursers. Oh, and about three grams of pizzazium infinionite."

"Well, isn't there a way you could, I don't know, make do without those things?"

Heinz threw his hands into the air in frustration.

"Look!" he exclaimed. "Science isn't just something you can bend to do whatever you feel like doing on any particular day. Some things just can't be changed, and some things just can't be done. Namely, building a space-time ripper without _at least_ five grams of pizzazium. How else are you supposed to generate high enough gravitron frequencies?" Candace seemed somewhat taken aback by his outburst, which made him snort to himself. _Good_ , he thought. Maybe now she'd stop asking such stupid questions. _Can you make do without those things_. Yeah, right.

"Well..." Candace said.

"Well what?" he demanded.

"My original self's brothers could probably make one with that much pizza - whatever you call that stuff."

Heinz rolled his eyes impossibly far. Was this woman trying to reverse-psych him?

"Look, Candace, I'd like to help, if only to get you out of my hair. But you can retry me with your time machine all you want: There is _no way_ to build a space-time ripper with the supplies in this building. The closest thing I could come to something like that is..." he paused briefly and looked back at the stuff on the table. "I could most likely put together some sort of time creasing device, but would literally just be a fancy time machine. It wouldn't be able to rip space unless somebody on the other side - someone _outside the space-time continuum_ , mind you - built a space ripper, and we carefully coordinated frequencies." Heinz shrugged his shoulders. "Sorry. That's the best I can do."

Candace stood still for a moment, not saying anything. Heinz briefly wondered if he'd managed to finally knock some sense into the orange-haired lunatic's skull. But no, he hadn't. Just a moment later, she spoke again.

"Can you build that?"

"Build _what_?" he asked, growing exhausted of this conversation.

"The creasing thing you mentioned."

"I mean, sure I _could_. But why?"

She flashed him a smile. "My original self's stupid brothers are beyond the space-time continuum, as you say. I wouldn't be surprised if they could build the other half device and that way you could open the portal together."

"You know what? Fine. Fine, whatever. I'll make you your creaser, and you can stand here and watch it all you want. But I am _gone_ , alright?" He had had more than enough of this whole situation. If she wanted to believe crazy stuff like that, then more power to her. Candace nodded at him.

Heinz muttered to himself under his breath as he scooped up the tools and supplies on the table and quickly constructed a small Time-Crease-Inator. A few minutes passed in which only the sounds of his tools could be heard in the large building. When he finished, he stood up.

"Alright. Here you go. Just press the red button, and it'll activate. There'll be no visible effect, so you can look at this dial," - and he tapped the glass cover of the dial in question - " to judge the thickness of the time crease. Green is normal - no crease, yellow means slight, red, means that it's thick enough to potentially work in concert with a space ripper to theoretically open spacetime. If the needle goes into the pink zone, _turn it off immediately_. It shouldn't - but you never know."

"Sounds simple enough," Candace replied.

"Yeah. Way simple. Totally." Heinz pressed the red button, and the inator hummed to life, the aforementioned dial needle slowly beginning to crawl across the color spectrum, as the machine began bending time in unnatural ways.

"And I just said no more reality-warping devices," he muttered to himself.

Turning back to Candace and speaking aloud, he rejoined his previous statement.

"Okay. There you have it. I'm out of here. Please, if you do manage to get ahold of your other self, tell her not to go messing with time again. Only bad things happen from stuff like that."

Candace cracked a wan smile. "Look who you're talking to," she pointed out.

"Yeah, I guess so. Whatever. I'm out of here."

"Wait!" she called. "How will I get back to town from here? It would be a really, really long walk." Heinz threw up his hands. Would this never end?

"There's a bus stop on Rally Street, just two streets from here!" he said. "Your forty-five dollars will be more than enough to get you from there to wherever you want to go."

"I guess so."

"You guess so." Heinz said under his breath, stalking out of the warehouse and into the alleyway behind it. He griped to himself the whole way back to his car.

"Great," he exclaimed when he arrived at his car and turned it on. "It's four o'clock. Well, there goes my whole afternoon." As he threw the car into drive and pulled onto the street however, something very very little, and very very deep in his mind quietly whispered: _I hope everything works out okay_.


	10. Explosive Assistance

For a long while Candace sat alone on the floor of the Molecular Re-atomizer's storage warehouse, leaning against the wall, not making a sound. The silence in the small space was broken only by the faint clattering of the roller coaster cars outside, traveling over and over around their endless loop of track. As she sat, eyes closed, breathing deeply in the perfectly still air, she could almost feel the almost constant adrenaline flow that had been in her blood since Wednesday melting away. She was ever so slowly letting herself back down from the intensity of emotion that she had so recently been undergoing. For a little bit, she successfully emptied her usually busy mind, and for the briefest of moments, felt an intense calm.

The moment was soon over, however. Under the direction of habit, she instinctively attempted to raise her left arm, and the shooting dart of pain that streaked up to her shoulder served to instantly drag her down from the clouds. Wincing, she bit her tongue and adjusted the sling strap over her shoulder. She'd need to get into the habit of letting that arm simply lie there - it wasn't going to be particularly useful for quite a long time.

Well, the moment of clearheadedness had passed. Reaching up with her right hand, she laid hold on a shelf sticking out of the wall, and used it as leverage to drag herself into a standing position. Once standing, she paused briefly before exiting the small building. What was there to do? While Phineas and Ferb figured out the way home, what was there for her? She wouldn't be opposed to helping them, but both Phineas and Ferb had run off to who knows where to do who knows what.

Sighing as she opened the door, she surveyed her surroundings. The lampposts shed their warm sun-replacing glow over everything, chasing away the frigidly cold gray light that illuminated the air everywhere else. The green grass was soft under her feet, as if inviting her to roll around on it. Maybe she would have - but her cast prevented such a thing.

As Candace looked around at the vast array of impossibly complex and colorful creations scattered around, she realized that she didn't really feel attracted to _any_ of them. Her eyes stared unseeing past the fun-house, the water slide, the rocket launching station, and the huge artificial beach. There was so much to do here, and yet, there was nothing to do. It was no wonder, really, that the roller coaster cars had appeared unused, that the fun-house doors stood unopened, the launch pads unmarred by rocket exhaust, and the sands of the beach lie undisturbed, shaped only the waves pounding on the shore. She supposed that Phineas and Ferb felt somewhat the same way as she did.

The stuff here was great - amazing, even - but could easily recreated back in the real world. Heck, most of the stuff here was in fact a recreation of something originally built elsewhere. Getting back to the world, back to the things, and more importantly, the people she had left behind, seemed to be the only thing that could truly hold her attention for long. Sure, it would undoubtedly be enjoyable to ride the 5D roller coaster, or mess about in the fun house. But she could do that anywhere. Only in reality, however, could she see the people that she cared about: her mother, her father, her very best friend, her boyfriend, and all such as that.

Now that she was here, Candace began to feel somewhat guilty for the way she had treated those close to her in the preceding handful of days. If they never managed to get back, or if the space-time continuum was irreparably damaged when they did so, would her last memories of them be of rudely brushing them off, offering up a mixture of half-truths and outright lies to escape their presence, whilst justifying her actions by reasoning that they _weren't really the people they were meant to be_?

It wasn't the sort of guilt that stems from regret, however. Her actions, though seemingly hard and cold, had been entirely necessary, in her eyes. How else could she have gotten this far? No, the guilt wasn't _I wish I could change what I did_. It was more of _I'm sorry it had to be that way_. But, indeed, it _had_ to be that way. She wondered what her old friends lives were like now that the past, present, and future had doubtless been rewritten without her. Unlike her brothers, Candace had made nothing faster-than-light, or larger than a small moon. There would be no quantum locked traces of her floating around in the universe. No, unlike her brothers, she would be well and truly gone.

It was a strange thing to think about - that you no longer exist. Having been so recently pacified, her creative urge lie still and silent at the bottom of Candace's mind, otherwise she might have found herself motivated to attempt to create something to escape. But what was there to create? She had seen the terrifyingly large list of her brother's failed ideas. And although she couldn't clearly dredge the list from her memory, she recalled it well enough to know that the small handful of ideas she had had had already been disproven.

Of all the things she had to worry about, the urges themselves were doubtless ranked near the top. She had succumbed to them repeatedly, but just like an addiction, nothing was ever enough. She always had to do _more_ , _bigger_ , and _better_. And if she didn't - well, it wasn't a happy thing to ponder. Just the mere thought of it sent chills up her spine. It was as if a part of her had permanently changed, and not necessarily for the better. Already, she had caught herself mentally constructing a method by which she could accelerate a roller coaster car into the sixth dimension of being, surpassing the usual five, three perceptible and two imperceptible by the naked eye.

Like, who did that?

She was a teenage girl - she should be occupied with thoughts of clothing and shopping, not breaking the rules of the universe to create a 6D roller coaster. When Phineas and Ferb eventually did discover the way back, how would she be able to reintegrate back into her old life, filled with school and Jeremy and, well, not much else, honestly. The only other major driving force in her life had been her ceaseless efforts to bust her brothers to her mother. Oddly - or perhaps not all that oddly - all her inclinations to bust them had simply evaporated into thin air. Was it strange that a goal for which she strove to reach for years would suddenly be given up? Perhaps.

But she'd walked the fabled mile in their shoes - had been on the other side of the fence, and discovered that the grass wasn't all that much greener over there. She couldn't even begin to fathom the idea of 'busting' now. What would the purpose be? Her brothers were most likely the only people in the entire multiverse she could properly relate to anymore, and not even in her most infuriated mood would she even dream of forcing her brothers to endure the mind-warping pain that filled her when she went to long with building. But busting had formed such a huge part of her psyche previously - and now with that gone, a huge void was left in its wake. Would she be able to slot back into the hole she had left behind, or even _pretend_ that she could?

It was thoughts such as these that kept her stone-still and staring blankly into space while next to the small warehouse. Gradually, she came out of her clouded thoughts, and blinked twice, bringing herself fully back to the ground. For the first moment, she couldn't even remember what she had been set on doing. Oh, that's right - nothing.

"I suppose," she slowly drawled aloud, her voice carrying far across the still air, "I suppose that could ... could hunt around and try to find my brothers." Yes, that was a decent idea. Phineas had seemed awfully upset when he had so abruptly left her and Ferb that morning, but surely by now he'd be back to his normal, cheery self. But how to find her brothers in this middle of this crazy-colored theme park of imagination-defying technology? It was huge, and they could be anywhere.

"Phineas! Ferb!" she shouted into the air, then listened silently as the echoes came back.

"Phineas! Ferb! Phineas! Ferb! Phineas! Ferb! Phineas! Ferb!" At last, the echoes faded out. Well, they couldn't hear her, wherever they were. But how was she to find them? Retracing the steps she'd taken that morning with Ferb, she trudged back to the depressing junkyard. Peeking down each aisle of projects, she hunted for either one of them. But no trace of them could be found here, either. It was a small wonder really, when you considered how draining that place was. Candace had only been here twice, and already was beginning to develop a hatred for it.

Leaving the junkyard behind, she walked along the path to the food stand buffet place where she'd eaten breakfast. There was no shortage of interesting things to look at on the walk, at least. She somewhat wished that her phone was able to teleport her like Phineas's and Ferb's phones were, which would make this whole process much easier. She could surely have made the appropriate modifications herself, but at the moment didn't really want to. Now was one of the handful of moments in which she had a real choice in the matter, and so she derived some sense of satisfaction in telling herself: _No_. She'd probably end up doing it anyway, either eventually relenting to stave off the headaches, or waiting too long and doing it at their bidding. But for now, she did nothing, instead opting to walk along normally, as a normal person might do.

When she arrived at the food stand buffet, it was as equally empty as the junkyard had been. The only sign of life in the area was the handful of little clean-up robots scattered about. Did they have artificial intelligence, or were they just programmed to do their specific tasks? Well, there was only one way to find out. Approaching a robot standing behind a booth containing a wide variety of pancakes, she cleared her throat.

"Heeey. Uh, do you have - are you intelligent?"

"I'm sorry, I didn't get that."

"I said, are you intelligent? Like, with fancy AI and stuff?"

"I'm sorry. I have no protocol for: _Are you intelligent. Like, with fancy AI and stuff_. Would you like to create a new protocol?"

Candace frowned. Obviously, these robots had no higher-functioning AI, but maybe they could still help her. They were food robots, right?

"Phineas wants a - a glass of milk."

"One _glass of milk_ coming up for _Phineas Flynn_." She followed the robot away from the pancake booth as it rolled over towards what resembled a soda machine. It rapidly pressed several combinations of buttons on the machine, and the thing vibrated slightly.

"Milk," the machine said, as a previously invisible panel in the front slid open, revealing a small, lit recess, in which sat a glass filled to the brim with milk. A long, metal arm slid from the front of the robot, grasping the cup and lifting it from the machine. The robot sat still for a few seconds, beeping quietly, then, a flash of purple light shone around it, and it disappeared.

Candace rolled her eyes. Great - it had teleported to Phineas, instead of just going there normally, in a way she could follow. A few moments later, and the purple light flashed again. The robot was back, missing the cup of milk. Well, shoot.

"Hey!" she called out to the robot as it was rolling back to the pancake booth. "Where was Phineas?"

"I'm sorry," it replied. "Would you like to place an order for _Phineas Flynn_?"

"No, I just want to know where he is."

"I'm sorry. I didn't get that. May I recommend some blueberry pancakes? Or perhaps a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?"

She sighed. These robots would be of no help to her. Unless ... the robot _did_ know where her brothers were, it just wasn't programmed to tell anyone. If she could change that, then she could get that information out of the machine. Well, she hadn't wanted to do anything crazy, but it looked like robot maintenance was unavoidable, especially if she wanted to get to Phineas and Ferb in any reasonable time frame.

But she had no tools - having left them back at the Molecular Re-atomizer's storage house. She threw back her head and heaved a huge sigh. Obviously Phineas and Ferb had designed this place with their teleportation matrix network in mind, not realizing it was going to be exceedingly tedious to navigate without one. She adjusted the strap of the sling over her shoulder and tried to come up with some way to find them without having to walk the entire distance back to the storage shed and back again. Although it was a pretty pleasant walk, as walks go, and not too terribly long, it was beginning to grow increasingly annoying as she considering taking it for the third and fourth times.

Her eyes fell upon the enormously thick base of the two trillion story skyscraper rising from the ground nearby. If they were in there, they'd be almost impossible to find. Maybe she could just go in there and take a look around the first couple of floors.

There also was no denying that Candace was just a little curious as to what it looked like on the inside. Even though for the most part, the insane creations around her had stirred up no such feeling, there was something different about the tower. Perhaps it was older sibling instinct telling her that they might be in there, or perhaps it just natural curiosity. Whatever the root cause behind it, it would prove a welcome distraction, for at least a little bit of time. No doubt wherever Phineas and Ferb where, they were hard at work putting together a machine to return them home. Could it hurt if she just checked out the bottom, like, five floors or so?

So it was decided. She left the food stands behind, and walked across the grass directly to the base of the tower. It was even more impressive when you were standing right next to it, which was definitely saying something. The windows and doors were tinted, obscuring the interior from outside viewing. Candace laid her hand on the door and gave it a hefty shove.

The glass door swung silently inwards, hinges not even making a sound. She could feel her eyes widening as she saw the inside of the building's lobby for the first time. The air inside was cool, and crisp, giving off an almost business-like atmosphere. The floors were made of black marble, so clean that it might as well have been one large mirror. The broad arching roof towered up above her, completely enclosing the small fountain in the middle of the room. The fountain's quiet gurgling echoed through the air, filling the cavernous space with constant background noise. In the wall opposite the main entrance, there was a single elevator, next to which stood a small podium with a book laid open on it. Drawing near, Candace saw that it was a guest book. Half of the open pages were already filled, though only with two names repeated over and over and over. Smiling somewhat, she picked up the pen lying next to the book and scribbled down her own name: _Candace G. Flynn_. It was a sudden break in the list of _Phineas Flynn_ 's and _Ferb Fletcher_ 's that filled the other lines of the book. Why had her brothers set up a guest book in a building that would only be used by the two of them? Only they could answer that.

Setting the pen back down, she pressed the button to call the elevator. The doors instantly slid open, with no wait time at all. She walked inside, and the doors closed behind her. Unlike the lobby, there was music in the elevator - elevator music, of course. It was _Gitchee Gitchee Goo_ again. Something about the familiar music helped make her crazy surroundings seem less crazy. She stood still for a few seconds, singing along in her head. Then, turning to the elevator panel, she discovered that there was no array of buttons.

Instead, there was a keypad with the numbers 0-9 on them, and a small blue screen above them. Underneath the pad, small yet boldly-colored letters read **Televator**. So, floor one? She pressed the '1' key, then the small 'enter' button. The number appeared on the screen, which remained blue for a moment, then changed to green. A small 'bing' noise could be heard, and brilliant purple light filled the small cabin. There was no sensation of movement, yet the 'bing' noise played again, and the doors of the elevator slid open, revealing an entirely different floor.

This floor was wholly and entirely different from the ground floor. The walls were splashed with brightly colored paint, and huge multi-colored balls rebounded back and forth from the walls and ceiling. Candace naturally recoiled slightly, and subconsciously brought up her right arm to protect her injured limb from the massive rubber balls pounding around. She slammed her hand down on the door button, sealing the elevator doors once more.

"Hard pass on the rubber balls of death, thank you very much," she mumbled under her breath. Maybe the second floor would be slightly more inviting. She pressed the '2' button, then enter. The purple light flashed again, and with another 'bing', the doors slid smoothly open.

This floor was slightly more inviting - but only slightly. Huge stacks of peanut butter jars towered up, from the floor all the way to the arching ceiling. There were some labelled ' _Creamy_ ' and some labelled ' _Crunchy_ ' and some labelled ' _In-Between_ '. It was enough peanut butter to feed an army - for months. The thick odor was like a wall, overpowering and intense, instantly driving out all other smells. It was so strong it brought tears to her eyes, as she attempted to breathe in the heavily peanutty air.

"Ah...Ah...Ah... _ACHOO_!" the sneeze violently convulsed up and down her body, and she reached blindly for the elevator buttons. Pressing the '3', she pressed the enter button and sneezed violently twice more after the doors slid shut. The peanut smell was so strong that the entire elevator still reeked. The by now-mundane purple light shone again, briefly, and the 'bing' noise. Then the doors slid open, revealing a new strange scene.

The doors had opened into a hallway - but it wasn't just any hallway. It was the all-too-familiar upstairs hallway of the yellow house on Maple Drive, which was now worlds away. Everything about the hall was exactly as Candace remembered it from a few days ago when she had last seen it. The carpet was the same plush, the bathroom door had the same squeak, and the runner had the same threadbare spot. There were two doors in the hall - and she knew even without looking what they were meant to be. One would be Phineas and Ferb's room, and one would be her room. Overcome with curiosity, she laid her hand on the knob of door that would have been hers. It swung inwards easily, and she caught her breath at the interior.

It _was_ her room - meticulously recreated down to the last detail. Everything was exactly the same: the bed, the closet filled with clothes, the Ducky Momo pillows on the bed. The single window of the room even appeared to look out over the old backyard. Upon closer inspection, she discovered it was an incredibly high-definition television screen making it seem so. She breathed deeply the air of the room. It really was an amazing recreation, so exquisitely the same that even she, who had lived for years in the actual room might have been fooled.

However, despite all that, her eyes did eventually light upon one small inaccuracy. The bed frame of _this_ bed was missing a long scratch down the left leg, one that she had made herself by mistake during the time she was disassembling and reassembling it a handful of nights ago. Barring that, however, the room was an exact replica of the real deal. Candace sat down on the bed, feeling the familiar softness, and for a moment was able to pretend that it was indeed the real thing.

But a muffled voice penetrating through the wall grabbed her attention. That could only mean one thing: Phineas or Ferb were nearby. Probably Phineas. She sprang up from the bed and hurriedly walked from her room to the door of her brothers'. She grabbed the knob, ready to fling the door open, but the muted conversation taking place on the other side stopped her. She withdrew her hand from the doorknob, instead opting to press her ear against the door, intent on listening in.

Phineas' voice came more clearly this time.

"You want an idea? I have one - I have plenty. Let me tell you some. Hang on. We could discover something that doesn't exist! or... or... tame tiger sharks! or stretch a rubber tree. Portals to other planets! Roller coasters! Roller coasters with peanut butter! And rubber snakes!" He paused. His tone was strange - it was an unsettling mix of frantic and panicky, yet at the same time, acceptance and defeat. "These are my ideas, Ferb. They're great ideas, really they are. But you know good and well, that _they won't get us home_." There was a long pause. Candace strained her ears to hear if Ferb was talking, but heard nothing. Phineas spoke up again, sounding somewhat more calm.

"I know. I know. 'Never give up!' woo... Yeah, I know. But Ferb, you heard me. I know that you, of all people, heard me. It's not that I want to - I don't! The very idea goes against my spirit - but what can I do? We could build roller coasters all day long for years and still we wouldn't be one iota closer to getting out of here." Candace heard a shaky, unsure laugh.

"Write that one down on the list of words infrequently used by children, Ferb. _Iota_. And not a bad one, if I do say so myself." She heard creaking, as if someone had sat down on a bed. A few long minutes passed without any speech.

A cold weight was beginning to build up in her mind. Was her brother implying what it sounded like? Was there no way out of here? She resisted the urge to burst into the room as she heard Ferb speak up.

"Don't panic. We'll figure it out in time. There's no need to get upset."

_What?_   She screamed internally. There was _plenty_ of reason to get upset! If the brief chunk of eavesdropped conversation she had gotten ahold of meant what it seemed ... well, yeah, being upset was plenty justified. She didn't want to live out here forever. It was nice, sure, but it wasn't home. It seemed Phineas agreed with her to some degree.

"I know, I know! I get that, I really do. But look at me! Ferb, I ... I ... well, I _can't_ do it. Just can't." Candace fought her urge to gasp, afraid of being heard. But it was hard - the situation was worse than she had thought. _Phineas_ saying that he wasn't up to a task? The idea was absolutely ludicrous, and yet, entirely terrifying. On the other side of the door, Phineas continued.

"And now Candace. Did you see Ferb? She's got it too, which is like the most amazing thing e _ver_ , only now it seems like we'll never be able to actually do anything together! There's no cosmos here to explore, or people here to meet, or world here to travel around. There's _nothing_ here. You know it, I know it, and I'm sure she's figured it out."

Candace felt rather humbled. Here was her brother, wrestling with what was apparently destined to be the first uncrossable chasm, the first unbreakable barrier, the first unbeatable challenge, and he was worried about _her_? She really couldn't have cared less about exploring the cosmos or traveling the world, but exploring the cosmos with her brothers? Well, that might be a different matter. The idea of riding a rocketship quadrillions of light years through space with them might have once seemed horrifying, but a lot had changed recently.

Phineas continued talking, although more subdued.

"She's told me some amazing things, you know? And if we never get home, it would be such a waste of so much potential coolness. We've done stuff, Ferb. We've hosted carnivals for the city, and remodeled deep space milkshake bars. We've seen people use the stuff we built, and enjoy it, and wish for more. They rode on our roller coasters, and used our time machine, and our shrinking device, and even the giant ant farm. But Candace - well, she hasn't. And if we can't get out, she never will. Can you imagine it? It'd be so sad if she never got to experience what its like be the one behind the wheel of the coaster or the space ship or the submarine. We know what that's like, and I want her to too, just so badly. But I just don't know anymore. I just don't know."

She heard a prolonged sigh from the other side of the door. She could hardly contain the push to just open the door and barge in anymore. But she didn't know much her brothers had or hadn't wanted her to hear. It was all so touching that she could hardly believe it had come from her own brother, her very own emotionally oblivious brother who never seemed to realize the depth or complexities of things like... like romance or even romantic relationships.

Of course, the undercurrent in his voice hadn't been romantic - that would be crazy to think. Her life was chock-full of 'crazy' things, but _that_ would surely be too crazy for even her life, right? (Maybe it was best not to tempt the Mysterious Force that seemingly existed only to prove her wrong.)

It had instead been an outpouring of sibling love, the likes of which she had only ever seen directed at Ferb. It was heart-melting stuff. The brotherly relationship between Phineas and Ferb was the strongest one she could immediately think of, to the degree that it was the first that popped to mind when she thought of siblings in general. She had a good relationship with her younger brother, she liked to think. Yet, even at her most optimistic, she had always known that their bond was far closer. Of course, that was partly her fault, which she well enough knew. If it hadn't been for him, it would have likely been far weaker than it was even now. Phineas had done far more than was rightly his share in propping up the relationship between the two of them - and the knowledge of this fact had always made her feel somewhat guilty.

Back at home, the guilt over things of this nature had been shoved to the far back corner of her mind. She had other things to do! Busting, shopping, Jeremy, chatting with her friends. But so, so much had changed since then, and the guilt wasn't so easily disposed of now. With an immense effort, she tore herself away from her listening position at the door. Even her worry about whether or not getting back home would even be possible had retreated somewhat to the background. She softly padded down the carpeted hallway away from the door.

Retreating into the elevator, she pressed the '2' button, and rode it quietly to the peanut floor. The all-conquering odor of legumes once again consumed her, letting her tell herself that it was merely the ridiculously strong smell that was causing tears to well up and leak out. For several minutes she sat on a crate of creamy peanut butter jars, half crying, and half in a sneezing fit from the sheer amount of peanut dust floating around. At last, however, the sneezes gradually overcame, and she retreated back to the elevator. Selecting the ground floor button, the elevator seamlessly transported her back to the glossy marble lobby.

Walking past the guest book, she took the time to sign out, if only to go along with the joke. _Candace G. Flynn, signing out at... 3:43 PM_. Wow, where had the time gone? The afternoon had flown by quicker than one could say 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis', which perhaps wasn't that quickly after all.

She walked across the reflective marble floor, the clicking of her shoes echoing and reechoing in the empty space. Pulling the front door open, she gratefully stumbled out into the warm sunshine. Well, not sunshine per se, but the warm glow of the sunshine-replacing lamps scattered about, which did feel amazingly warm after the crisply chill atmosphere of the skyscraper's remarkably formal feeling lobby.

So, what now? She could feel the itch to build something growing in the back of her brain, a constant reminder that her body was no longer completely under own control. But what was to build? If she had understood the half-conversation correctly, then even her brothers were having trouble figuring a way home, to the extreme point that _Phineas_ was debating if it was even possible.

If _they_ couldn't do it, then Candace wasn't so full of herself as to think _she_ could, even with her recently-discovered inventing capabilities. Maybe further modifying her phone to access the teleportation matrix would be a good thing to do. It would serve many purposes - taking her mind off what she had overheard, pacifying the creative urges slowly gaining strength, and making it vastly easier to travel around to places. So that was the decision.

It was time then, to take the walk from the skyscraper to the Molecular Re-atomizer's warehouse again, hopefully for the last time. As she walked past the food stand buffet, her stomach grumbled loudly, signalling that there were also other bodily functions that needed attending. But she was determined to do the inventing first, afraid if she put it off any more, bad things would start happening.

The distance to the warehouse melted away before her, as she strode quickly over the soft green grass. Not knowing the direct way there, she had to follow the same path from the morning - traveling first to the junkyard, and to the warehouse from there. The unnecessary detour was probably adding an extra ten minutes to the walk, but whatever - it couldn't be helped.

As she walked past the junkyard, however, a high-pitched whine caught her ear. The junkyard was far enough away from the rest of Phineas and Ferb's little city that no sounds of the machines working there carried over, meaning the junkyard was usually completely silent. Candace wanted so badly to just ignore it and walk on by, but the itch behind her head was strong by now, and the inventing part of her brain was already kicking into gear. So, her curiosity was ignited, and she grudgingly rerouted her steps into the yard to ascertain the cause of the unusual sound. The first few rows of failed projects were completely devoid anything that could do something like that - but the fifth row caught her eye.

A dim green light was leaking out from behind a tall metal panel attached to a Ultraviolet-Induced Silicon Particle Reducer. Being careful of her left arm, she threw her weight against the large and bulky UISPR, and slowly pushed it out of the way. Behind it sat a much smaller device, on which was affixed the offending LED, and from which the sound was being emitted.

Candace frowned briefly, studying the thing on the ground before her. It was a Spatial Limitation Re-calibrator, probably better known as a space ripper. It really was a cool invention. Indeed, it was this thing that was the key to 'British sci-fi technology', such as rooms larger on the inside and things of that nature.

No doubt Phineas and Ferb had built it, knowing fully well that it would be unable to rip time, but willing to try anyway, likely for reasons of thoroughness. But something strange was going on with the machine right now.

There was a small dial attached to it, labelled ' _Structural Integrity of Space-time_ '. The dial had four colored quadrants: pink, red, yellow and green. A small black needle was swinging about jankily inside the yellow quadrant, ever so slowly creeping towards the red one. Her eyes flashed over the small control panel, with it's limited array of displays. Most were perfectly normal, but one immediately grabbed her attention.

A small screen labelled ' _Gravitron Frequency_ ', which had a value of forty-five point seventy six, rising steadily at a rate of almost a tenth of a point a second.

Candace knew the math behind the spacetime continuum, and knew well enough that the reason that space rippers were unable to open temporal rifts was because they could never never stimulate gravitrons to a high enough frequency. Despite all these things she knew, however, this machine seemed to doing _just that_. Indeed, as the needle of the four-colored dial crept into the red section, the frequency number peaked straight into prime rift opening range - about sixty. Was it some sort of strange mechanical malfunction causing it read a frequency that wasn't truly there?

In a spurt of determination, Candace grabbed up the space ripper, and dropped it again almost immediately, as its intense vibrations ripped it straight from her grasp.

Whatever. She'd just start it up here. Grabbing ahold of the lever on the side, she gave it a firm pull. Instantly, the rest of the LEDs on the machine began going crazy - flashing all sorts of colors. The previously high-pitched whine began deepening in pitch, becoming more of a buzzing, then a hum. The pointed nozzle of the space ripper began to glow, first red, the bright orange, then a brilliant white so bright she had to shield her eyes.

_I really should get some sort of sunglasses for when I use these things._ she thought, raising her right arm to shield her eyes from the intense scouring light.

But space rippers didn't glow during normal operation. Why was this one? What was going on with it? The lights and sounds coming from it were awfully similar to the lights and sounds that had been emitted from the space- _time_ ripper she built back in that warehouse.

The ripper's pointed tip was glowing even more brightly now, and it was starting to get hot, baking the surrounding area with the white-hot heat of a machine forced to do something for which it was not intended. Slowly, shakily, the needle of the dial continued across the red section and towards the pink one. As soon as it reached the pink section, however, bad things began happening. A heretofore unlit bulb began flashing, and the loud humming became interspersed with the wail of an alarm. It continued glowing brighter and hotter, until Candace was driven away all the way down to end of the junkyard row. Even there, almost fifty feet away from the thing, she could still feel the heat radiating off it.

Then, the situation went from bad to worse. The sharp angles and exact corners of the metal structure bent slightly, sagging downwards as the space-ripper began to melt under its own heat. The frequency number began rocketing upwards, soon ticking past a hundred and fifty.

The walls slumped inwards, and glass shattering could heard as the LEDs exploded one by one. The colors oozed downwards from the dial, collecting in a puddle of molten pigment on the ground. She suddenly realized what was happening, and became possessed with an overwhelming desire to save herself from the impending meltdown. Curiosity and the complaints from her injured arm were thrown to the wind as instinctual self-preservation took over. Scrambling to her feet, she turned tail and ran. The humming of the machine grew louder and louder, then stopped abruptly. Knowing there were only seconds left, she dove beneath the sheltering cover of an overturned time machine laying nearby - and not a moment too soon.

There was no deafening noise, or dramatic plume of smoke - although the explosion that occurred was just as deadly without these. A sort of splattering noise could be heard, and large globs of molten metal were violently flung to and fro, raining down like hot lava on the junkyard. She recoiled deeper underneath the cover of the time machine as the fiery hot rain pounded down around her, creating sickly sizzling wherever the metal landed. No doubt many of the creations here in the junkyard were ruined, with holes melted in them, or straight-up pulverized by the concussive force of the blast if they were close enough to the epicenter.

A decent amount of time passed, as she stayed crouched underneath her shelter, waiting out the storm.

At last, it had been several minutes since she had seen the last droplet of metal fall. Nervously poking out her head, she surveyed the sky. It was clear, with no sign of any any airborne death waiting for her to expose herself. Satisfied, she crawled out from under the time machine, and quickly looked around, trying to see just how bad it had been.

Okay, it was bad, but not nearly as bad as she had thought it would be. There were certainly plenty of red-hot puddles lying around, marking the ground and melting holes into the various contraptions stacked up and piled around. But they were fairly well spread out, and could easily be avoided by carefully watching where one was walking. Candace grimaced to herself as she straighten out her sling, readjusting the angle on which it hung.

Man, that hurt pretty bad. When she had hurt her foot a while back, it hadn't quite so bad, although that was probably because she had done nothing but lie in bed with that stupid traction thing or whatever it was called. Of course, crawling down the stairs and across the yard had hurt to high heaven, but at the time it had been worth it to her.

Now, thinking back on it, it was rather embarrassing to think about.

Would Phineas and Ferb be upset about what had happened? Probably not, after all, it was a _junkyard_ for a reason. At least, she hoped so. Carefully navigating through the debris back to where the space-ripper had once been, she was disappointed to discover that it had been entirely destroyed. It should have seemed obvious in retrospect, after all, the melted metal flung so wildly about _had_ been the metal that had made up the machine. But you could always hope, right?

Now that the immediate danger was over, the old itch had returned to its place in her mind, even stronger than before. It had been merely a handful of hours since she had built that a Quantum Light Amplification Stimulator, which was doubtless still sitting where she had left in on the floor of the Molecular Re-atomizer's warehouse.

Well, it had been a bit longer that - a good few hours at least. Where had the time gone? She hadn't done _that_ much today, much less hours' worth of stuff. It truly had flown by.

Gingerly picking her path out of the junkyard, she rapidly traveled the short remaining distance to the warehouse. Doubtless much of that time had been burnt walking to and from places, a drain which she was now hopefully be going to able to remedy.

Sliding the Light Stimulator out of the way, she pulled out her phone and sat it on the floor. It had been several days without charging now, and was already on the verge of death. Well, she could make a charger for it as well. That would be quite easy compared to hooking up her phone to whatever teleportation matrix her brothers had set up, which she also fully intended to do.

Operating the soldering iron or the arc welder or doing transistor calibrations with only one hand would be a nightmare, but it wouldn't be impossible. Heck, it might even have been easier if it _was_ impossible. Slowly but surely, however, she got it done. Working off of the assumption that Phineas and Ferb's teleportation matrix functioned based on beta particle transpiration, she carefully created a tiny microprocessor and ion reintegrater to slot inside the back of her phone, and connect with the already somewhat modified GPS chip. The whole deal with her cast didn't make it any easier, but she still got it done after a little bit of work.

Carefully reattaching the back cover panel to the back of her phone, she flipped it over and turned it on again. The matrix network had been fairly easy to locate, and latch on to, probably due to the fact that there was so little network traffic outside reality. Only three phones in the whole plane of nonexistence.

Opening up the GPS application, she was quite satisfied as the static-filled screen and bold **No Signal** faded out, replaced with a sharp, crystal clear satellite image of the little cluster of civilization that didn't exist. The map was scattered about with small red dots, marking the location of teleportation exits. Selecting the point closest to the food stand buffet were she had been that morning, the purple light flashed around her, and when it cleared, she was sitting on the exact same picnic table bench.

Awesome! It had worked.

The smell of the food from the stands distracted her - grabbing her attention and distracting her from any further inventing. She was hungry again - and for good reason. Stuffing her phone into her pocket, she picked up a plate from the stand and looked around at the various options for meals. There were so many - but she eventually settled on the chicken soup. There were two huge pots in a stand just a few yards away. Putting down the plate and picking up a bowl instead, she walked over to the pots. They had lids on, and the leftmost pot had a hastily scribbled sticky note attached to it.

_Candace, don't eat from this pot. It's got parsnips in it._

Well, that was nice of them. Lifting the lid of the other one, she sat the bowl down and ladled the steaming hot soup into the bowl. Returning to the picnic table, she sat down and prepared to eat. The soup was good - the chicken was warm and tender, and really good. Where had the meat even come from? She had seen now animals of any kind since arriving here. Perhaps it was lab-grown meat or something. Either way, it tasted great. Finishing the meal, she got up from the table and left her dishes for the robots to take care of.

So, where were Phineas and Ferb now? Surely they hadn't been locked up in their room this whole time? She pulled out her phone and opened the teleportation map. Time to triangulate on them - but first, a bathroom.

A handful of minutes later, Candace left the incredibly large and fancy bathroom on the 1,857,148,429,828th floor of the skyscraper. The entire floor had been one large bathroom, in fact, and was equipped with pretty much everything imaginable, ranging from ten-ply toilet paper that was as soft as a cotton blanket to multicolored hairbrushes that came in every color of the rainbow. Running her tongue over her now-clean teeth, she reproduced her phone. Time to find her brothers, for real this time.

They were no longer on the third floor of the skyscraper. Instead, they were on the top of it - the two and a half trillionth floor. Well, if they had left the room, then they must have been done with whatever stuff they had wanted to talk about in private. Tapping the screen, purple light flickered around her, and she was transported instantly to the two trillion and six hundred billionth floor, which was still under construction.

Her brothers were there, stacking steel and laying bricks. When Ferb saw her materialize, he motioned to Phineas, and they quickly cut off the noisy construction equipment. Phineas took off his hard hat and approached her.

"Oh. Hey, Candace. I - I'm sorry we left you alone for so long," he apologized." We just started building floors and time kind of got away from us. There was, uh, some pretty touchy stuff going on."

"It's okay," she reassured, although she would have preferred to have had company. Phineas didn't say anything, and sort of stared awkwardly at her, passing his hard hat back and forth between his left and right hands.

"Hey," he spoke up. "What happened to your hair?"

Candace started. What? Reaching back and running her hand through her hair, her fingers ran into a strange, rough feeling spot. Pulling the clump of strands forwards to see them, she realized that a large clump had been blackened from something. Probably the explosion in the junkyard. Well, that would be a pain to get rid of.

"Oh," she laughed, somewhat nervously. "There was a .. well, I guess you could call it an explosion."

"An explosion?" Phineas' curiosity was aroused. "What? Where? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she replied. "It was just in the junkyard. The space-ripper you had there had some weird sort of issue and melted down." She didn't really want to talk about _that_. She was more interested in what she had overheard Phineas talking about earlier. But, she didn't want them to know she had been eavesdropping, and wasn't sure of how to steer the conversation in that direction without letting them realize that.

Phineas was intrigued however, and wouldn't let the conversation go.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I don't know for sure. It was behaving as if it was receiving an extremely high gravitron frequency from somewhere, and then it tried to use the high frequency to open a rift, but it melted down. And then exploded."

"What? How did it do that by itself?"

Candace took a slight step back, a bit wary of upsetting her younger brother.

"Uh, it didn't. I - uh - I turned it on," she cringed back just a tiny bit, now feeling stupid for having pulled that start lever. Of course the machine wasn't working right - reading ghost gravitron frequencies. What had she expected to happen?

"Oh. That's kind of strange. Did you see anything unusual that could have made it do something like that?"

"No - it just started glowing really bright and got really hot, then it just went _boom_ , pretty much."

"Huh. That is kind of weird."

"Mmm hmm."

"So, uh, can you listen for a second?" Candace's eyebrows went up. Was he going to talk about what she had overheard?

"Sure... what is it?" she asked, attempting to act as if she had no idea what he was referring to.

"So, uh, well, it sort of seems as if we may have to stay here a bit longer than we wanted to."

Candace did her best 'shocked' face. It seemed as if the conclusions she had drawn from what she'd heard were correct after all. Still, having it for sure confirmed was like a death knell.

"What do you mean by that?" she asked. Phineas stared at the ground and poked the floor with his shoe.

"I've, well, I've tried all my-" he paused, as Ferb stepped over and tapped him on the shoulder. "What is it?"

Ferb's face was as smooth and his voice was as calm as ever. "Candace said the space-ripper melted down while operationally receiving high gravitron frequencies. If true, that means the structural integrity of spacetime will be drastically lowered for a short while, as the continuum attempts to repair itself."

The news, however, was incredibly exciting. Of course what he said was true! She hadn't even thought of it.

"But," she pointed out, not wanting to rain on the parade, but at the same time not wanting to stir up false hopes, "Even _with_ a weakened structure, the continuum will still be impenetrable without Pizzazium."

Nevertheless, Phineas smiled - and all the clouds on his face were instantly gone. "Not necessarily," he said. "You see, space-time rippers require pizzazium infinionite's insane energy radiation to power up and puncture a hole through space-time."

Candace nodded. She knew that - but what did that have to do with anything? Her brother continued.

"And _that's_ how we can get home! You _can't_ cut through the continuum without Pizzazium. But, you could _take a slice off it_!" He paused and took a deep breath.

"See, what we've been trying to do is go straight from here back into reality, cutting through the space-time continuum to do so. But, without pizzazium, it's like trying to cut a hole straight through a steak with a butter knife. Now, if you have use a butter knife to cut a steak, wouldn't it be much easier to approach it from an angle, carving off a slice from the side? Of course! We won't be able to get back to _our_ reality from here, but with the newly weakened continuum, and a little bit of luck and a whole lot of polonium, we can build a device that can slice across the _edge_ of the continuum, shaving off a slice instead of trying to go right through it."

"But that - that won't get us home." Candace said hesitatingly. But Phineas, growing more exited by the moment, wasn't set back at all by her doubts.

"Well, no, it won't. But, it _will_ bring us back into reality. Not our home plane of reality, of course, but a parallel one. From there, all we'll have to do is build, like, an inter-plane transporter, which will be _sooo_ much easier. I'm sure you know, Candace."

She nodded. It _would_ be much easier. No matter which plane of reality they happened to end up in, they would at least be in _a_ plane of reality - they would exist again.

"And it's all because I blew up the junkyard," she said.

"That's true! Maybe we should have you blow up everything."

Candace smiled wryly.

Despite the generally calm sounding exchange, Candace was about to explode just like the space-ripper had. Phineas had done it again - in complete contradiction to the things she had overheard that afternoon. It was an insane relief. They were going home - not directly, but it was still a step in the right direction.

"Ferb," Phineas said, "and Candace! can't forget about you. Guys, I know what we're going to do today!" He smiled brightly, beaming at the both of them. He was back - and seemed better than ever.

* * *

For a long while Candace sat alone on the floor of the Hidden Rising Tower, Inc. warehouse, leaning against the wall, not making a sound.

The silence in the small space was broken only by the faint humming of the time thingamajig that Doofenshmirtz had made before storming out. She didn't know if this would work, but by this point in time, she was pretty much desperate enough to try anything.

Her life after becoming a temporal anomaly hadn't been easy by any means whatsoever, and after struggling for months to bring it back to some semblance of livableness, the nightmare had struck again, and she was absolutely fed up with it.

She could never un-become an anomaly, of course. Her _stupid_ brothers and their _stupid_ time machine had ensured that. That crazy day of time travel nuttiness that had single-handedly ruined her life was still fresh in her memory as if it had been yesterday.

It was still somewhat hard for her to comprehend, even thinking back on it. She'd seen her brothers and herself - younger versions of the three of them, and had taken their time machine back into the past, to bust them for the gigantic, dumb roller coaster that they had built like twenty years ago. At last - revenge for a stress-filled childhood would be hers. On her way to get ahold of the younger version of her mother, however, she'd been tackled to the ground by herself - an older version of herself in a lab coat - who claimed that if she actually busted her brothers, it would basically ruin the future - making it some sort of crazy dystopia full of people genuflecting and erecting giant statues of some old bald guy.

So, she'd gone along with her older self, and there had been a cheesy touching moment where she had almost finally given up her busting urges. After all - the young versions of her brothers had a strong resemblance of her own three children, and it had stirred up some strange emotions in her heart. Of course, all of that had been erased instantly just a handful of moments later, when she had returned to the future.

To her horror, she had discovered that the future _no longer contained her_.

Not Candace, the future still contained Candace Flynn, alright, but not her _specifically_. She'd become a quantum anomaly, torn off from the normal timeline the moment her older self had ceased to exist. When that had happened, well, the spacetime continuum doesn't like things with no future.

When older her had ceased to exist, she should have as well, but hadn't, because she had used a time machine, becoming quantum locked in the process. So, when the space-time continuum rewrote the future, altering who Candace grew into, she had remained, existing in a perpetual state of quantum error.

She'd first realized that upon trying to let herself back into her own home and finding that her key didn't work. Her phone was disconnected, and her banking records were gone, and her identification cards scanned invalid everywhere she went. The future had been altered, the flow of time changed, and she was on the outside of it.

She'd lurked around what had once been her own house until she saw the new Future Candace come home - her replacement. Her three children were different as well - they numbered fewer and looked different. So much about childbirth is random that it was somewhat understandable that the history rewrite would change them, but it was still frightening to see such drastic changes in things like height and hair color for herself.

It was too much to take for one person. She'd gone to her brothers there in the future, desperately hoping the then twenty-something year-olds would be able to help the stranger who just so happened to have a strong resemblance to their sister - and, incidentally, the Queen of Drusselstein.

Convincing them that she was indeed _a_ Candace Flynn had been easy - taking a DNA test, and comparing the results with the original Candace. But even Phineas and Ferb had been no help in the end. Phineas had offered to let her stay with him and his family, saying he felt bad for not being being able to help resolve the quantum error.

The gesture had done nothing but inflame her wrath. She didn't _want_ pity! She wanted her _life_ back, her life that only she could remember. And once again, her good-for-nothing brothers had absolutely quashed any chance of normalcy, even after adulthood.

So she ran - and left the Tri-State Area. She'd hitchhiked and walked all the way to the Quad-State-Area nearby, and attempted to take up residence there. If her old life was completely gone, she might as well try to find a new one, and so help her, but this one would not have her brothers in it. All they did was ruin _everything_.

Trying to establish a new life with no birth records, or family records, or school records, or records of any kind had been hard.

The law degree she'd worked so hard for was completely gone - and top things off, the Original Candace had gone into an entirely different field. So, she was forced to take up an entry-level job in a fast food restaurant, working day and night to make ends meet. Taxes had been a nightmare - as far as the federal government was concerned, she was an unregistered immigrant from some other country. Which country? Well, it didn't matter. She had to deal with the immigration and taxation agencies breathing down the back of her neck, as they both expected her explain where she had come from and where she was going to go.

Eventually, she settled on the lie that her parents had snuck into the US and birthed her while here, both either dying or running off, and abandoning her. For months on end, she filled out endless forms and paperwork, trying to establish herself as someone who existed. She couldn't even become a citizen for years and was forced to apply for a green card, which had been incredibly expensive, especially on the tiny wage she was earning. She even debated trying to skip the process by marrying somebody, but the thought was repulsive to her. In _her_ timeline, she'd been married to her one and only - Jeremy Johnson. In this new rewritten future, she had no idea who the original her was married to. Jeremy? Maybe.

The thought that it could have been anyone else boggled her mind, but the phone book still listed her original self as _Flynn, Candace G._ , even though she had seen children with her own eyes. Maybe the children weren't even hers anymore. Anything was possible.

It honestly didn't matter. Besides her name, which she kept purely because it would have insanely hard to get used to another, she did everything to sever the ties between herself and the her old family. Why should she try to rebuild a relationship? None of them knew her. To them, she was no more than a stranger who happened to look a lot like someone they knew. Only Phineas and Ferb and Original Candace would ever be able fully grasp what happened and who she was, and she wanted _nothing_ to do with the three of them. Absolutely nothing. They had already ruined her life once - why should she let them do it again?

And yet, it had happened again. Of course it had - her stupid brothers were always messing things up for her. Just when she had been on the brink of re-establishing her life, of getting back some sense of normalcy, she had woken up one Thursday morning only to find the future entirely different _again_. This time around, it had turned into some sort of dystopia similar to the one she had been told would have been formed if she had busted her brothers for the roller coaster.

The bright and clean streets of the city of Brockton in the Quad-State Area had been transformed overnight into grim, decaying paths offsetting crumbling infrastructure and dilapidated buildings.

Of course, it was Phineas and Ferb's fault again. It _had_ to be. And she wasn't going to run _this_ time.

She'd worked day and night for months trying to rebuild a life for herself. _This_ time she was going to find her brothers and _make_ them set it right. She had gotten on her bicycle - still unable to afford a car - and had pedaled all the way over to the city of Danville - which had been renamed ' **Remember** '.

At least, that's what the big sign on the road had said.

Danville had been no better than Brockton had been. And wherever she looked, she could find no trace of her brothers. Great! Well, then she'd take the other option. It was time to travel through time again, and nip this thing in the bud before it began. She'd traveled to Danville's condemned museum and fired up the dusty time machine, traveling twenty years into the past.

But, when she knocked on the door of the house on Maple Drive, she listened quietly as Linda Flynn-Fletcher told the stranger that she had only one child - a daughter.

That could only mean one thing, of course. Her dumb brothers had somehow managed to erase _themselves_ from existence, which had been what had so drastically altered the future.

So how could she fix this?

A few days of brainstorming and traveling up and down past Danville's decidedly non-dystopic streets, she'd had an idea. Her old childhood friend, Vanessa Doofenshmirtz, had once said that her father was a mad scientist, right? That was what she remembered, at least. So, she had tracked down the only big high school in Danville and caught Vanessa as she was getting into a car with some woman, probably her mother. It was weird talking to her old friend again, and the fact that Vanessa was a child again made it even weirder.

Nevertheless, she'd successfully gotten ahold of Doofenshmirtz's address from the girl, and biked over to the small house. The first forty something attempts to get the man to fix the spacetime continuum had gone disastrously, and he'd kicked her out of his house more times than she could count. Not to be dissuaded, however, she kept going back to the time machine at the museum. The machine had gotten incredibly nasty for reason, as well, which was positively _lovely_. Huge blood stains were spattered about on it, and the podium on which it stood. Even so, she overcame her revulsion and used it to travel to repeatedly travel small distances into the past and stop her past selves from going into Doofenshmirtz's house.

"Let me do it," she'd say. Her past selves would agree. Armed with ever-increasing knowledge of the future, she'd eventually successfully convinced the scientist to help her.

And that was pretty much how she got here, sitting alone in a warehouse, staring at a small multi-colored dial on a high-tech time box or whatever it was. Hopefully it would work. Although her life as an anomaly before had been by no means pleasant, it would be infinitely better to have it back than having to start over again.

Suddenly, however, her silent recollection was shattered by the loud sound of metal grating against metal. The darkened warehouse room was suddenly flooded with warm late afternoon sunlight as the huge front door was slid protestingly open.

"Hey!" a high-pitched voice rang through space. "Who are you? And what are you doing in my laboratory?"

Uh oh - this must be that Rodney fellow that Doofenshmirtz had said the lab belonged to.

"Well?" Rodney demanding, striding towards her. Candace checked the time thingy quickly, making sure the needle was safely out of the pink zone, and then rose to her feet.

"It doesn't matter!" Rodney exclaimed. "I want you out! Now!" He pulled a small silvery remote out of his pocket, and pressed a few buttons it. A weird squelching noise could be heard, and a radiant blue light shone from around him. What was _that_ thing?

Rodney seemed satisfied. He smiled, then walked straight towards her, not slowing down at all, as if he expected to be able walk through her. Instead, he slammed into her with such force that both he and Candace were roughly thrown to the concrete floor.

"Hey!" she exclaimed. "Watch it, you moron! You _can_ see me, can't you?"

"What just happened?" he asked, sitting up. Candace rolled her eyes. She watched as he picked himself up and walked over to a nearby wall, sticking his arm through it as if it were air.

Her eyes widened. This was some Phineas-and-Ferb style muckery. He walked up to her, and stuck his hand out, poking her in the arm.

"Back off!" she snapped, slapping his hand away.

"Ugh! Stupid girl and her stupid gadgets!" he suddenly burst, pulling out that remote again and throwing it to the floor in wrath. Turning back to her, he repeated. "I don't know who you are, or how you got in here, but I want you gone. _Now_."

Candace crossed her arms. "Alright, whatever, dude." She bent down and picked up the time machine.

"No!" he exclaimed. "You leave _that_! I can see it's been made from my parts. Wait a second... did _you_ make that?"

"It's none of your business," Candace retorted. "Either I leave with it or stay with it. You can choose which one."

Rodney looked her up and down. "You wouldn't happen to know one Candace Flynn, would you?"

Candace hesitated briefly. How had he known her name?

"No" she said. "I'm ... Bob." Okay, wow. That was a stupid thing to say.

" _Bob_?" he spat incredulously. "You expect _me_ to believe _that_? Hah! Well, I don't know who you are, but you _are_ leaving now, and the machine _is_ staying." Candace tucked the machine snugly under her arm.

"Over my dead body," she said resolutely.

Rodney smiled disturbingly. "That ... can be arranged."

His tone was dead serious and for a moment, a shiver of fear went through Candace's heart. Just who was this Rodney fellow, anyway? Doofenshmirtz had called him ' _evil_ '. Just what exactly did that entail?

Rodney lashed forwards and laid a grip on the time machine, attempting to pull it suddenly from her grip. It almost worked, too, but she managed to seize onto the other end at the last moment.

"Give...it...to...me!" he huffed through grit teeth, pulling with all his might.

"Not...happ...en...ing!" she responded, pulling the other way.

Torn between the two of them, the machine stretched frighteningly, the rivets holding it together straining to keep the metal in one piece. The needle of the dial began shaking wildly around as they fought over it. It wavered back and forth, settling on the pink section. Candace's eyes widened as Doofenshmirtz's warning replayed in her head.

_If it goes into the pink section, turn it off_ _ **immediately**_.

Uh oh.

"We need to turn it off!" she exclaimed.

"Just give it ... and I will!" Rodney spat back.

She knew he wouldn't, of course. She had to get the thing out of his grip. She re-adjusted her fingers and re-doubled her grip. But Rodney suddenly let go of his end, sending her tumbling backwards - head over heels into the wall. The device fell to the concrete floor and shattered into pieces.

Candace ignored the pain of slamming into the floor so roughly and staggered back to her feet.

"Now look at what you've done!" she cried. "Now I have to get Doofen-"

Rodney rudely cut her off. "Doofenshmirtz! I should have known! That low-life scoun-"

_FWOOSH!_

Rodney in turn was cut off as a huge curtain of purple flames exploded forth from the ruins of the machine. His eyes grew large behind his wire-frame glasses.

"Was there ... pizzazium infinionite ... in that thing?" he stammered out, looking at the oddly-colored tongues of fire.

Candace scowled. "Yeah, like two chunks or whatever."

Whatever little color was in the man's bald face instantly drained, and he turned tail and began to run. Not particularly keen on the idea of finding out what he had been talking about, she took off after him, following him out of the warehouses main entrance, and into the by now nearly abandoned warehouse district street.

As she was chasing after him, the entire ground was shaken, so violently that they were thrown to the ground, and the loudest explosion you ever heard burst into her ears with cataclysmic force.

Shreds of metal and concrete rained from the sky as the Hidden Rising Tower Inc. warehouse was instantly blown to smithereens. Loud crackling competed with the ringing in her ears to be heard. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the now-flattened lot was consumed in ten-foot flames, raging violently as they devoured all before them, filling the street with unearthly purple glow.

She had to get out of there before the fire department and the police department showed up, wanting to interview people. As she shakily crawled to her feet and jogged away from the scene, she shook her head. Well, there was yet another fail.

"I guess it's back to the museum for me. Fiftieth time's the charm, right?"


	11. A Brand New Reality

"Man! I see you've been busy. When did you link up to the teleportation network anyway?"

"This afternoon, while you guys were ... gone."

"Oh. You didn't have to do that, you know. We would've been glad to do it for you, if you'd asked us."

"Nah, it's okay. I didn't mind - it didn't take that long." Candace re-adjusted her sling, attempting to shift its weight to a different spot on her shoulder. Phineas noted the movement.

"You want an anti-grav device for that?" he asked. Now, that was a good idea. She hadn't even thought of it.

"That would be great - but I can make it." Phineas paused momentarily.

"Yes, yes you can. While you do that, Ferb and I will work on the new and improved space-time ripper, although I suppose that it would be more apt to call it a slicer now." He turned to Ferb, who was standing next to the Molecular Re-atomizer.

"Let's get this show on the road." Candace watched as Ferb fired up the small machine, printing out the stack of supplies they needed. Titanium, tungsten, polonium, carbon, copper, and sheets of various other materials were soon stacked neatly on the floor. Phineas picked up the toolbox lying on the ground and doled out the contents.

The three of them set to work, welding and soldering and wiring and programming and screwing screws and fastening bolts and setting up containment canisters for the lethally radioactive polonium. The polonium-powered fission reactor would provide just enough power to slice across the surface of the curvature of the continuum, breaching the protective barrier of the conceptually curved tube of space-time. Without the exceedingly high radiant energy emitted from Pizzazium Infinionite's unique internal structure, there was no way to excite gravitron frequency high enough to directly pierce the continuum, but like Phineas had pointed out, a simple cold fusion generator _would_ be enough power to get back into reality. If they took the long route.

The oxymoronic statement she had just made was not lost on her either. _Simple cold fusion generator_. Right - a technology that alone in itself had eluded teams of highly-trained scientists for decades was simple. Even as she used her single hand to seal the conduit circuits, however, it really did seem simple to her - a fact which was both really cool and really scary at the same time.

She kept working, not allowing her thoughts to come in the way. They were too close now for her to sit around with her head up in the clouds. Her brothers were silent as they knelt on the floor next to her, intently assembling the parts of the machine closer to them. As they all worked, the piles of raw materials were gradually hammered and melted and fastened into a finished product. A shiny six-foot base supported a thick podium, to the top of which was attached a large box with a cone protruding from the top. A antenna stuck straight from the top of cone, almost scraping against the ceiling of the warehouse. Three screens graced the sides of the box, flickering on and off with static as Ferb wired up the interior. From atop a stepladder, Phineas carefully calibrated the angle of the cone and antenna, being doubly sure to make certain they were in the correct position. Candace fastened the tubing connecting the machine to the cold fusion generator, adjusting coolant and heating element levels as necessary when the temperature of the fissile material on the inside rose up and down.

"Testing - 1...2...3..." Phineas said, pressing down a the singular button the side of the creation. Electrical sparks crackled in the dry air, making Candace's hair stand up on end. She reached out and touched the metal screwdriver on the floor, letting out a small wince at the jolt upon doing so.

"Testing - 1...2...3..." The antenna glowed dimly, and the screens on the box-like section flashed over with complex mathematical expressions.

"Testing - 1...2...3..." A quiet humming emanated from the cold fusion generator as it underwent the consecutively larger demands for power.

Phineas climbed down the from the step ladder and turned to the both of them.

"I think it's ready for the first field test!" he announced. "Let's get this thing outside." Together, the three of them got behind it and pushed it out of the door of the storage warehouse, and onto the soft grass outside.

"We should have put wheels on this thing," Candace grunted.

"Yeah," Phineas agreed. "We had a hand-held tractor beam for moving heavy stuff like this, but I don't know where it went." Ferb said nothing, of course, but he nodded, giving his assent silently.

It was mostly a moot point - there was no specific place the thing was supposed to be anyway, Candace thought. She assumed that Phineas had merely wanted it outside in the odd case it exploded, which was fair enough. Once they had pushed it about thirty or forty feet from the building, they stopped. It was as good a place as any.

"Alright," Candace said, "Let's see if this works."

"It will." Phineas's voice suddenly took on a worrying tone. "It will." He cleared his throat and smiled at her. "I'm sure of it."

Deciding to not push the matter any farther, she waited silently as Ferb rapidly tapped the screens, programming last minute instructions into the device. Normally she'd have had full confidence that whatever her brothers built would work, but after all, there _was_ a junkyard filled with thousands upon thousands of rejected machines here, and they weren't there because they had succeeded.

Ferb stepped back from the device and waved at her to come over.

"You can do the honors," Phineas said, translating Ferb's silent gaze for her. Candace grinned despite herself.

"Thanks, guys. If it explodes, I guess two broken bones can't be any worse than one."

"Oh!" Phineas interjected. "That's right. You were going to make an anti-grav for your cast. Did you have time to do that?" She shook her head.

"I will, I will - but I just really want to get home right now." It would have taken her all of fifteen minutes to assemble one, and yet the idea of waiting fifteen more minutes in this place seemed an eternity too long. It was kind of odd - being in the non-dimension must have really distorted how you perceive time. Only an hour earlier, she had realized that almost ten hours had passed in what seemed like minutes, and now the idea of spending minutes more here was what seemed like hours.

Phineas seemed about to speak, but Ferb placed a hand on his shoulder, and the two of them shared a look she could not interpret, which seemed to put a stop to whatever he had been about to say. A moment of silence passed, and Candace suddenly became determined to end it.

"Here goes nothing - and everything," she said, turning to the button. Reaching forward with her good hand, she firmly depressed it.

Almost instantly, a change ran through the machine. The polonium fission reactor hummed a bit louder as it sped up its own internal working to handle the unprecedented new request for power. She could almost see the electricity pulsing through the wiring connecting the reactor to the base of the machine. Sparks of static electricity arced through the air around them, causing everyone's hair to stand on end this time. The antenna glowed dimly again, in a faint shade of purple, and the cone-shaped projection device vibrated slightly. Then - for just a second - the machine was still, all sound and motion ceasing. The moment of stillness was soon gone. The the antenna waggled back and forth, making that weird noise that happens when you shake the end of a long, thin, piece of metal. A purple beam shot from tip of it, and loud screeching noise tore through the air. Candace instantly recognized it - how could she not? It was the sound of space and time being torn asunder, a sound like no other in the multiverse.

A sound that would probably haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life.

The stream of purple light curved over and dove straight into the ground. The grass around it rose up and down as if caught in the clutches of an earthquake.

Then, it fell inwards - as an oval hole was torn in the ground, growing in size until it was almost ten feet wide. When Candace leaned over and looked into the hole, she saw ... mist. White mist, and loads of it. The hole into reality led into huge bank of mist. But it didn't matter! It was a hole back to reality. Maybe not their plane of reality, but it was _a_ plane of reality. Wasn't that good enough? Well, no, but it was definitely a good stepping stone.

"Alright!" Phineas cheered. "It works! I just wonder what slice of the multiverse it opened into?"

He stepped over to the edge of the hole and carefully stuck his hand into the white mist.

"It's kinda wet feeling," he said after a moment, "Like, I don't know, air after a rainstorm or something." Candace followed him to the hole and ran her fingers through the mist. Water droplets collected on her hand as she did so, not enough to make it feel wet, but definitely a shade of dampness. It was a cool kind of moisture - not cold, just cool, without being sticky.

"We should throw something in to see where the ground is," she said.

"That's an excellent idea." Phineas pulled a small brightly-colored stick-like object from his pocket and tossed into the mist. They listened quietly as the thing disappeared, but no sound could be heard. Phineas's brow furrowed slightly, and he produced another.

This time, however, he also pulled out a lighter and lit the end of it on fire.

"Do you always keep your pockets full of rockets?" Candace asked. "That doesn't seem safe."

"With our special rockets, it is." he replied. He pointed the tip of the rocket down into the mist, and let go. A loud swooshing noise came from the rocket, and a trail of blue and red sparks followed it as it propelled itself down through the mist. Once again, they listened. The noise of the rocket faded out gradually, eventually becoming inaudible. Around thirty seconds later, the mist bank flashed with bright red and blue light. Roughly six or seven seconds after that, the high-pitched crackling noise of a firework explosion echoed from far away to their ears.

"Hmm," Phineas mumbled to himself.

Oh! Candace knew what he was doing. Hang on, she could figure this out before he did. So, judging by its size, the firework had most likely been a six-inch rocket, which travels at a top speed of about 140 miles an hour. She assumed that the rocket had not detonated until hit the ground - which would have made that about thirty seconds later. So, thirty seconds of traveling at 140 miles an hour would have covered about uh... one point two miles, and there's 5,280 feet in a mile so that would be roughly...

"It's roughly 6,700 feet to the ground," Phineas said. Dang. She had been so close.

"That's ... a long way," she replied.

"It most certainly is."

"You know," Ferb said from behind them, prompting them both to immediately turn around. "That's the approximate height of most lower cloud banks."

"You're right!" Phineas exclaimed. "I'll bet you that's what this is."

Candace raised one eyebrow.

"So this white mist is just a cloud - I can see that. But then how on earth did our portal open up so high the sky?"

Phineas shrugged. "That isn't our plane of reality of down there. It's another one - symptomatic of us traveling kind of parallel to the quantum energy flow instead of perpendicular to it."

"Well, I knew that, but it's still kind of inconvenient."

Phineas nodded. "It certainly is. But still, it's better than like, in the middle of the ocean or wherever."

"Do you think there's land down there or water?"

Phineas paused for a second before answering. "I'd assume land. I don't think the rocket would have exploded if it had hit water."

"So I guess we need to build some sort of flying or floating thing to help get us down there? You know, in one piece. Last time I tried to shimmy down a rope through a temporal portal, well, bad things happened."

Phineas laughed. "Don't worry. There won't be any ropes. In fact, I think we've already got the perfect tool for the job."

"Then what are we waiting for?" Candace asked.

"Hang on, sis. We need to pack up - since it isn't our plane of reality we need to prepare for whatever we might find down there."

Candace couldn't really think of any good rebuttal to _that_ point.

"Alright, I guess. But let's hurry! What can I do to help?"

Phineas pulled out his phone and tapped the screen several times. "First, we have to get the plane. It's at the teleporter matrix exit located three exits to the northeast of the skyscraper."

Candace pulled out her own phone and opened up the matrix interface. "Okay," she replied. "I'll see you there." She pressed the onscreen button, and purple light glowed brightly around her. The next thing she knew - she was standing in front of a large object covered in a sheet. Phineas and Ferb were there too - arriving at more or less the same time as her.

Eyeing the thing under the sheet, she had more than a few doubts about its usefulness.

"Uh," she asked. "How is the Statue of Liberty going to help us fly? Did you like, put rockets on it or something?"

Phineas looked at the sheet and seemed somewhat surprised.

"That's kind of strange. Ferb, what do you think the odds of _that_ are?" he said.

Instead of answering, Ferb stepped forwards and, in a single motion, slid the sheet off the object and onto the ground. The white fabric settled to the floor, revealing not a statue, but a small white plane that, strangely enough, looked nothing at all like the Statue of Liberty. It was white, and had red letters stenciled along the side: **Sun Beater 3001**.

"Ta da!" Phineas said, throwing up his hands. "I'm sure that you remember the rather ignoble fate of the three-thousandth Sun Beater. Well, this one is better!"

Ferb gave a thumbs up and smiled, then jumped up and grabbed onto the right wing of the little plane, which rocked under his weight.

"Most importantly," Phineas continued, "The wings stay attached much better. Actually, _everything_ stays attached much better."

"Well, I guess that's good," Candace replied.

"You bet it is. This version is powered by a cold-fusion operated rocket engine, which gives it a top speed of about 1200 miles an hour. That's pretty slow, but still fast enough to be deserving of it's name."

Ferb pulled himself up on top of the wing and slid open the domed cockpit.

"And don't worry, Candace. There were no celebrity cameos for you to miss during this particular project - unless you count the food robots." Candace rolled her eyes.

"Oh, that's a relief. So, what all you are planning pack in there?"

"Not much. Just some food and water, and supplies for a dimensional plane transporter. We're gonna take everything required to build one, so that the only thing we need from the other plane of reality is Pizzazium Infinionite. Once we get that, we'll be good to go."

"Alright then. Let's do this thing. I'm ready to be gone."

"As are we all."

From inside the cockpit, Ferb did something that made a small flight of stairs unfold from the side of the plane, making an easy ramp up the seats on the interior. Candace followed Phineas as he bounded up the steps.

"Strap in!" Phineas said, retracting the stairs, closing the glass dome and sealing the cockpit. He sat in the front seat and press the engine starter button. Almost instantly, the rocket engine mounted on the back of the plane trembled and began emitting a soft blue glow. He grabbed the joystick and drove the plane across ground, careful to not hit anything, until they had crossed the length of the little city and had arrived outside the Molecular Re-Atomizer's warehouse again. Once there, he opened the cockpit and jumped up.

"Let's pack this bad boy."

'Packing' was pretty easy, what with the Molecular Re-Atomizer and all. Candace used it print out more stacks of raw materials, and Phineas and Ferb neatly stacked them in the back of plane. The whole process took no longer than ten minutes, and yet by the time they were done, there were enough supplies in the plane to sustain the three of them for weeks and weeks, if it became necessary. Just as they were finishing, a beeping noise started coming from the Re-Atomizer. It was running out of base material to rip apart and reassemble.

"Well," Candace said to herself. "Guess no one will ever to refill it. It'll just sit here in this warehouse beyond all of reality and beep for all of eternity."

"Candace!" Phineas yelled from the plane waiting outside, "That's everything we'll need. Come on, let's get out of here!" The words were like music to her ears. Almost knocking over the Re-atomizer in her haste, she ran from warehouse to the plane.

"Hang on," she said, pausing in front of him. "Did you want to take the giant floating baby head that was in the warehouse too?"

"What? There was a giant floating ... that's funny. Did you make it?" She shook her head.

"Well, I sure didn't. I don't think we'll need it anyway."

"Whatever you say," she replied, starting to walk past him.

"Here." Phineas stopped her, pressing a little bottle into her hand. "For emergencies."

She glanced down. It was just a stereotypical dark reddish-orange medicine bottle, labeled ' _aminomethylbenzoic acid_ '.

"Phineas," she said. "When have I _ever_ carried around coagulant for emergencies? You know its not that big of a thing to worry about. Literally _every_ year at checkup the doctor says by the time I began bleeding bad enough for it kick in, I'd already be in trouble from blood loss alone." The statement was kind of a direct contradiction to the fainting spell from just a few days ago, but a few days ago there had also been the wild card of time travel, which was bound to throw things off a bit.

"I know," he replied. "But we _are_ traveling to another plane of reality, which is something we've never done before, and so I though better safe than sorry. Besides, it's not like that you're getting special treatment. Ferb is bringing an aid kit that's packed with pretty much everything."

"First aid kit?" she asked.

"No - just aid. With the stuff inside it, you could set a broken bone or treat a bacterial infection or perform open-heart surgery."

She eyed Phineas for moment, hunting for signs of jest.

"Okay," she eventually relented, tucking the bottle into her pocket, where it barely fit next to her phone and the box from the Martians and the strange note that apparently had come from nowhere. Candace sat down in one of the seats of the plane and strapped herself in.

"Alright, Ferb, Candace," Phineas said from the front seat. "Be ready for a bit of turbulence as we re-enter reality. You guys ready?"

"Yup." she replied. Ferb gave a thumbs up.

"Then let's go!" Phineas placed his hand on the throttle and slowly gave the engine more power, causing the plane to begin rolling across the ground. He turned the plane around until it was lined up with the hole in the ground, which was still filled with the white mist that they had determined must have been clouds.

"Hang on tight!" he said, as the plane rolled towards it. The wheel under the nose slid into the hole, causing the plane to jerk downwards at a frightening angle. Candace grabbed onto the arm of her seat with her good hand. As the back wheels of the plane continued pushing forwards, it grew more and more steep until it was almost vertical.

"And here we gooooooo...!" Phineas exclaimed, suddenly pushing the throttle up to max.

The engine roared behind them, and the plane more swiftly rolled forwards, until the weight hanging off the hole was too much, and the whole thing went tumbling in. Almost instantly, Candace went from having to brace herself to keep herself in her seat to being thrust back against it. The plane plunged downwards, popping out of the bottom of the mist bank. It revealed a scene that could not have been more _beautiful_.

There was green grass! And blue sky! And the sun!

It was there, bright and warm and yellow, shedding its brilliant light over everything in view. And, stretching out on the ground below them - was a _city_! Buildings were sprawled about, and roads snaked here and there, looking so small from so far up in the sky.

Phineas pulled back on the joystick, and the plane righted itself. Gradually, the insane force pushing her into the seat lessened, and Candace was able to sit forward and look out the window. Even her fear of heights couldn't stop her from gawking at the - the everything spread out below. It was all just so amazing. Even though she knew this place wasn't home, that it was an entirely different plane of existence, it was still so familiar-looking she couldn't help but feel closer to home.

"Did you feel that?" Phineas asked.

"Feel what?"

"Well, you can't actually _feel_ it exactly, but I meant the changing of the space-time continuum."

"What?"

"We were outside of space and time - so the continuum acted as if we had never existed. Now-" Candace knew where he was going and finished the sentence for him.

"-that we are back inside the continuum, it readjusted to allow for our existence again."

"Pretty much."

"Huh," Candace said thoughtfully. "I hope Mom and Dad don't freak too much. They'll remember you guys again. But, you're nowhere to be found." The more she thought about it, the more worrisome the situation seemed. It was just another reason why they had to get home soon.

Phineas looked worried for just a moment.

"The best we can do is try to get home as soon as possible," he said. "And that's what we're doing."

"I know, I know. I just can't help but worry a little." She glanced over at Ferb, who was quietly listening in his seat. He shrugged his shoulders slightly. They were right, and she knew it, but worrying about things was just a part of her nature - part of what made Candace Flynn who she was, for better or for worse.

Up until now, the ride in the Sun Beater 3001 had been remarkably smooth, with barely a hint to the fact that there was a giant rocket engine sticking out of the back it. However, it now began vibrating beneath Candace, shaking just imperceptibly at first, and gently increasing in strength until the whole craft was violently rocking back and forth in the air. A loud roar filled the tiny cabin.

"What's happening?!" she yelled to be heard. Phineas's hands flew over the control panel, rapidly trying to ascertain the answer.

"Some kind of weird turbulence patterns!" he yelled back. "I can't seem to-" his voice trailed away.

From out of a cloud bank just to the side of them, the front end of a _massive_ jet aircraft appeared, bearing down with frightening speed on their tiny plane.

"Go down!" Candace shouted, upon seeing the huge airplane. It was easily forty or fifty times larger than the Sun Beater, and the sextuple turbine engines on its wings were shaking their tiny craft like a leaf.

Phineas grabbed ahold of the joystick, and pushed down on it as hard as was humanly possible. The Sun Beater almost immediately began diving down and to the left, veering away from the huge airliner cutting through the air. It was almost enough - but only almost. The right wing of the Sun Beater brushed against the bottom of the larger plane, and was instantly just _gone_. Smoke billowed from the side of the little plane, leaving a dark trail in the air. Candace's eyes widened in fear.

At the control panel, Phineas was struggling to rapidly spiraling craft under control. The loud beeping noise of an alarm filled cabin. The three of them were once more shoved backwards into their seats as the aircraft began tumbling from the sky.

"I can't keep it in the air!" he shouted. "Make sure you're strapped in, and hang on to your butt!"

"Wha-" Candace began, but the sentence was never finished.

Phineas reached to the far end of the control panel, and flipped open a small glass cover that was protecting a single red button. With no hesitation, he slammed his hand down on it. An even louder klaxon began blaring, and oxygen masks tumbled down from the roof. Candace struggled violently with hers, unable to fit it over her face with only one hand. Thankfully, Ferb came to the rescue, putting on his own, and then leaning over and helping her put it on. And it wasn't a moment to soon.

With a loud _bang_ , the glass canopy sealing in the cockpit was launched away from the craft, and the ear-piercingly loud wailing of the wind as the plane plummeted out of the sky ruined any further chance at communication.

_What's happening?_ she thought, becoming frozen in place. Her fear of heights was suddenly back in full force.

Ferb reached over and grabbed ahold of her good hand. With a tremendous noise, the base to which the seats were attached was rocketed away from the failing aircraft. She screamed - but was barely able to hear herself over the cacophonous sounds coming from every direction at once.

Then - it was over. There was a loud rustling, and a _snap_ , and three large, multicolored parachutes exploded from the seating platform that had been ejected so violently from the craft. The three of them were jerked up violently as the parachutes expanded, but the seat belts held securely, and the parachutes absorbed the weight of the load. The whistling noise of the wind ceased, and the seats began floating gently, driven before the gentle breeze.

Beneath them, the smoking hull of the Sun Beater 3001 continued spiraling downwards, until it slammed into the ground with a astonishingly loud crashing noise. But, up on the seating platform suspended by parachutes, everything was peaceful.

Phineas pulled out his phone and checked something on it. Seeming satisfied, he reached up and pulled off his oxygen mask. Ferb and Candace followed his example.

"Well," Phineas started. "Seems like anything time we try to build one of those, the only thing that's left of it are the seats by the time we land."

"That's _not_ funny," Candace replied, still not daring to look down at the ground below. "That was terrifying." Phineas smiled good-naturedly.

"It was," he agreed "Terrifyingly cool! Just think, we rode on _top_ of a rocket for a little bit. How cool is that?" Now that the moment was over, the fear was slowly draining from her, leaving her significantly calmer.

"Okay," she relented at last. "It was a _little_ cool."

"It was _way_ cool," he insisted laughingly. "But seriously, it does seem like we're always crashing these things."

"And here I thought the time the other one broke apart was because you said your singer friends decided to stand on top the wing, making it snap off before we even got off the ground."

Phineas laughed. "Well, that definitely didn't help, but wasn't the main reason for the break up. A series of rough landings and having to take on extra weight halfway through the trip was what did us in for good." Candace didn't answer. Instead, she just leaned back in her seat and took in her surroundings, still careful to avoid looking down.

Suspended in mid-air, ever so slowly drifting downwards, everything was so peaceful. The sky, though. It was just... _amazing_ to look at. Even though she'd been in the non-dimension for less than a day, the endless gray fog banks there were intolerably gloomy to look at, and suffocating to live under. It was so great just to be able to look up and see blue sky, and white clouds, and the sun, and birds, and airplanes - although seeing slightly fewer planes might also have been good a few minutes ago.

"The rift we were able to slice open won't stay open forever," she mused to herself. It would close of its own accord once the space-time continuum self-repaired the damage done to it by the meltdown of the space ripper. Once it had repaired itself, the energy barrier would become once again too strong for a non-pizzazium powered device, even with the whole 'perpendicular slicing' thing. And once it closed, the final trace of that horrid place would be gone. Although, perhaps not forever.

It was still a mystery just what had triggered the space-ripper meltdown. Ah, well. As Phineas had said before, sometimes you just have good luck. Candace tapped her fingers on the hard surface of her cast.

"How long do you think it will be until we reach the ground?" she asked after a few more minutes of staring off into space.

Phineas glanced at Ferb, then back at her, and shrugged. "It almost entirely depends on the wind. If it keeps up like this, it could be as little as fifteen minutes. But, we didn't pack a weather controller on the Sun Beater, so it's all kind of up in the air."

She took a deep breath and willed herself slowly to look over the edge of the platform. The distance to the ground was dramatically shorter now, and the view of the city below was much clearer.

For a brief moment, chills ran up her spine. The city was an odd juxtaposition of old and new, clean and dirty, decaying and fresh. Towering buildings neatly painted stood in stark contrast to rows and rows of dull, gray, dilapidated buildings. The parts of the city marked by crumbling infrastructure and ancient-looking buildings bore an unsettling similarity to Dystopic Future Danville - and _that_ place was terrible. Thankfully, however, she'd managed to find her brothers, and they were back in reality. That awful future, for both Danville and herself, had been averted.

She hoped.

So what was the deal with the city below them? She wondered what it was named, what it was like, and who the people were who lived down there. It was a shame that the first time anyone had ever traveled to another plane of reality would result in them immediately returning home, but there was no desire in her heart to stay. It was a good thing they wouldn't have to. With the supplies on the ... oh.

"Phineas," she said. "We lost all the supplies we brought!"

"That's true," he answered. "But don't worry about it. I'm sure we can get the stuff we need down there. It'll just be a small detour, and we'll be on our way."

Candace wished she could share in Phineas's eternal optimism. Suddenly confronted with the fact that they would indeed have to remain in the city for longer than planned, her entire opinion of it changed. The clean, new, fresh parts of it shrunk in comparison to the battered, collapsing stretches. It now seemed to resemble a war zone, in which only a few select places had managed to avoid total destruction.

What about the people who lived here? What would they be like? Would they be significantly different from Candace, and Phineas, and Ferb? They _were_ from another dimension, after all. Would they speak the same language? Would they want to help?

A loud scraping noise startled her from her worried thoughts. The platform had brushed against the roof of a skyscraper, causing sparks to fly. It banged against the side of the building, and drifted in the other direction. With the buildings now towering around them, Candace's fears were both nullified and strengthened. The state of the buildings around them wasn't nearly as bad as it had seemed from higher in the air.

But, at the same time, it _was_ still pretty bad. And worst of all, the streets were completely abandoned. Completely. There weren't even any cars or buses or anything. The banging of the platform against the walls of the buildings as it clattered into them on its way to the ground echoed through empty streets.

The sheer desolation of the place again reminded her of Dystopic Future Danville.

_Calm down_ , she told herself. There was no need to be reminded of that place. This was an entirely different dimension, after all. Maybe in this dimension, the drab gray paint the coated literally everything was a sign of wealth, or something. The idea was feeble even in her own mind, but still helped her calm down a little bit.

With jolt that jerked everyone forwards against the restraining seat belts, the seat platform made contact with ground. The wind in the chutes dragged it a few more feet, tossing up sparks and making a terrible scraping noise, but the parachutes gradually deflated and fluttered down over top of them, the thick heavy fabric covering them like a blanket.

"Alright!" Phineas exclaimed. "Let's get busy."

Candace reached down and slid her fingers across the length of the seat belt until she found the buckle and pressed the release, feeling it go slack. Pushing against the weighty parachute fabric draped over her, she eventually was able to slide out from under it and step off the platform.

Man, it was great to feel solid ground beneath her feet again. Phineas and Ferb appeared out from under the parachutes as well, and stood next to her.

"So," Phineas began. "First off, I know what we're going to do ... this afternoon." He paused briefly, as if thinking how to continue. "We know what we need to do. An inter-dimensional transportation device. Now, the math behind it is pretty simple, just mind the forty-third hex character and you'll be good."

"And don't forget to account for quantum shift when calculating frequency requirements," Candace interrupted to input.

"Yes, that too." He smiled at her. "Ferb and I put a transponder in the Sun Beater when we built it, so it shouldn't too hard to track it to the place where it crashed."

Ferb pulled out his phone and held it up in the air for a moment. Then, he pointed off down the street.

"Guess it's that way," Phineas said. "Come on!"

So they set off, walking through the eerily abandoned alleyways and streets still illuminated by the light of the fast-fading afternoon. The streets were completely free of litter, but also free of any sign of life. There were only stunted small plants growing here and there, and everywhere you looked, there were no people to be seen.

The drab gray buildings all around appeared to be entirely empty and deserted, and the whole place somewhat resembled a ghost town. None of the windows had lights in them, none of the doors were opened, and walls were unstained by the dirt of human life. Torn posters hung on the walls, but they weren't torn from age - on the contrary, they were quite new-looking.

The tears were fresh and clean, as if someone had grabbed the bottoms of the posters and forcibly ripped them away from the wall without bothering to pull out the nails securing them. From one of the posters that had a particularly large scrap still remaining, a large orange ' **O** ' glared, as if declaring ' **Oranges** ' or ' **Octopi** '. Of course, there were neither oranges nor octopi anywhere on the streets of the abandoned city, making it doubtful that was what had been actually written on it.

After a few minutes of traveling through the streets, they rounded a corner and saw a huge quantity of smoke pouring out of a small two-story building in front of them. Phineas glanced over Ferb's shoulder to steal a glance at his phone screen.

"It's in there," he said.

Candace looked over the fairly average size building once more. Even without the GPS tracker, it was fairly obvious that _something_ had impacted the building.

They walked up to the main door and gave the knob a try. It yielded easily, swinging inwards to reveal an absolute mess. In the middle of the floor lie the horrifically mangled remains of the Sun Beater, illuminated from above by the sunshine that streamed in through the hole in the roof and second story floor that had been torn in the catastrophic descent. Thankfully, there was no fire, though the amount smoke that was pouring off it warned that one could start any second.

The building itself was just as empty on the inside as it had appeared on the outside. The floor was covered in gray tiles, and the walls were painted the same shade of gray.

"Come on!" Phineas said, jarring her from her thoughts. "Let's get the supplies out of the crash before a fire starts."

She tried to help - she really did. But even though she was close to twice her younger brothers' height, the cast on her arm heavily decreased the amount of things she could lift, and left her feeling somewhat useless. Nevertheless, what supplies could be salvaged from the wreck were relatively quickly extricated from the rubble and stacked neatly in the corner of the room. Not everything could saved - the container full of maple syrup had cracked open and run out all over the ground, and the sheet of silver had been shattered apart by the impact. But the tungsten and the titanium were okay, as was the steel, though it was somewhat scratched up.

Why had they even brought a container full of maple syrup in the first place? Candace wondered.

After a while, the dying sunlight mostly exhausted and giving only the most pitiful of light, they had managed to recover everything that was in any shape recoverable. That included salvaging sheets of metal and computer processing chips from inside the Sun Beater itself. They had taken so much away from the wreck that the remaining pile was smaller than the stacks of materials re-appropriated. It was no longer really a wreck anyway, more of a pile of things considered unusable, like shattered glass or leaky pipes or horribly crumpled metal sheets.

"Well," Candace said, leaning against the rocket engine of the Sun Beater, which had been disconnected and carefully repaired for a possible future use. "We should have enough stuff here for a dimensional traveling device, barring Pizzazium Infinionite, of course."

"That's true." Phineas replied. "It was lucky that tungsten cone survived the crash. Now we just need a handful of Pizzazium and we'll be good to go."

"Ugh," Candace sighed. "Finding Pizzazium in this ghost town is gonna be ... " there was an awkward pause. She couldn't say _impossible_ , if anything, the impossible was nowhere nearly as daunting a task. "...it's so _implausible,_ " she eventually finished.

"Implausible?" Phineas questioned. "That's just impossible with a few extra steps. Besides, we're back in space-time now. That means, among other things, that we can build a time machine and try to synthesize pizzazium from a Molecular Re-atomizer."

The fact made her perk up.

"That's ... true! Well, maybe this won't be half as bad as I thought. Come on, let's build ourselves a time machine."

"That's the spirit!" Phineas agreed.

Ferb reached down into the pile of reclaimed parts and produced a box of tools.

With the three of them working together, a time machine would be child's play. As they worked, the already weak sunlight streaming through the hole in the building's roof continued to weaken, until it faded out entirely. Night had fallen in this dimension. It wasn't that big of an issue. Ferb took a handful of minutes to put together a really bright flashlight, and they continued working under brilliant artificial illumination.

After just a few minutes, they were done. The brand new time machine sat before them, with the Sun Beater 3001 logo still plastered on the side of the metal used to make it. From there, the rest of the process was easy. The Molecular Re-atomizer was remarkably easy to make, and was assembled in just a matter of minutes. But it was there that the otherwise foolproof plan hit a snag.

"Uh, guys," Candace said, holding up the power cord attached to the Re-atomizer. "Where exactly am I supposed to plug this thing in?" Phineas and Ferb followed her eyes around the room, but no power outlets could be found.

"You know, I hadn't thought of that," Phineas said thoughtfully. "The Re-atomizer sucks up a lot of power. Like a lot a lot. In fact, the whole reason that we never use it to make stuff for ordinary projects is that it would basically black out the entire Tri-State Area in the process of making anything larger than a square yard or two. You know, because it requires roughly twice the amount of energy in any given thing to create one of that given thing."

"What?" Candace questioned. But, the gears of her brain started turning, and the mental math she subconsciously began doing served only to confirm Phineas's statement.

He continued. "In the non-dimension, we powered the Re-atomizer on fission generators, which gave it power for us to make the concrete and steel we needed. (To make the fission generators, we had to go way old fashioned and power it on steam.) It takes about twelve thousand large-scale fission generators to produce the energy to Re-atomize the material in an average-sized office building over the course of two hours. We had ours hooked up to eighty thousand 2.2 megaton fission generators, which was how it was possible to make so much so quickly. Making pizzazium infinionite, well would take twice the energy of whatever amount you made."

"And the only thing with twice as much energy as _X_ grams of Pizzazium is 2 _X_ grams of Pizzazium," Candace finished.

"Well," Ferb put in. "Not entirely. If you took every particle in all the known and unknown universe, and turned each one of those into a full-sized planet Earth, and each particle in each planet was a 3.5 megaton fission generator, then you would be be able to re-atomize _X_ grams of Pizzazium in approximately..-"

"543.32 times _X_ solar hours," she sighed. "Yeah, I know."

"That's true as well," Phineas said. "But I don't think that's what we should be aiming to do."

"Then why did we go through the whole process of building this Re-atomizer and time machine anyway?" Candace asked.

"I really don't know. Force of habit, maybe?"

Candace dropped the cord to the ground. "Well that's just great." She sighed. "Where are we gonna get Pizzazium Infinionite from then?"

This situation was awfully reminiscent of her troubles with finding materials for a space-time ripper in the first place. Only, now they were in another dimension, one without creepy bald men who said they were 'evil' but nonetheless had loads of pizzazium lying around.

"Don't worry about it," Phineas said.

"What do you mean _don't worry about it_? I think worrying about it is very justified right now. It's like seven o'clock at night, and here we are, trapped in an alternate dimension, with no way back unless we can somehow get ahold of Pizzazium, which, mind you, _is_ the most least common element of them all."

Her rant didn't seem to phase Phineas, however.

"Don't worry," he repeated. "We have this _entire_ dimension at our disposal! We can just take apart this time machine and put together another plane, although this time we'll avoid naming it Sun Beater, if you know what I mean."

"And fly around randomly, looking for pizzazium? Do you think there's going to be just a huge pile of it lying around out there?"

"Well, there might be, but I wasn't counting on it. What I was more of the mind to do was use the plane to travel around the city, and find some of the people who live here. I'm sure they could give us some information on where we could get ahold of some of the stuff."

Candace didn't reply. Phineas's optimism was infectious, and although the situation seemed rather hopeless, she decided to not to freak out just yet. Worrying was one thing, but full-on panic could wait for a while. After all, when did Phineas and Ferb ever fail to ultimately achieve their goal? They had failed on their way to success before, but she'd never seen them actually _fail_ fail. After all, who had literally  _just_ figured the way out of the non-dimension?

So, she took a deep breath to calm herself.

"Alright," she finally answered. "Alright."

Phineas seemed pleased at her response. "Well, let's get busy! I know what we're going... Well, I think you get the point by now."

She smirked, but knelt down and picked up a screw gun from the ground.

"Let's dismantle us a time machine."

The freshly put-together machine was easily cut up and unscrewed into its separate parts. The engine was pulled out and rewired to once again propel itself through space rather than time. The new aircraft was far smaller than the Sun Beater, and was more of a hovercraft than a plane anyway, unable to actually fly, per se, but instead capable of hovering a good three feet or so over the ground.

The huge rocket engine from the Sun Beater was re-appropriated and attached to the back of the small vehicle, dwarfing the actual craft itself. Since there was no protective canopy to shield passengers from the noise of the engine, they added several more layers of noise-absorbing insulation to help keep it slightly quieter. Of course, it was never going to completely silent (it was an eight-foot-long rocket engine, after all) but the insulation did help somewhat. The three of them piled on to it, and since there were no seats - having left the seats behind in the alleyway with the parachutes - they were forced to limit the top speed of the craft to around fifteen miles an hour to avoid issues with falling off.

The rocket hummed beneath the noise canceller and smoothly lifted the craft off the ground. It was a rather incongruous machine, strongly looking as if they had done nothing more than strap a giant rocket to the back of a sheet of metal held aloft by a thrumming green tube running beneath it. And that was more or less what had been done, although the steering system was a bit more complex than it looked.

The small hovercraft floated gently out the open doors of the building, and into the dark street. There were no streetlights anywhere to be seen, so only the blueish light coming from the rocket's exhaust was any illumination. And just like before, the cold moon looked down on a deserted street, devoid of any human life.

"Hey!"

_Almost_ any human life. The sudden voice, cutting through the otherwise quiet night, was so unexpected that Candace almost fell over. It had been nearly two days now since she had heard a voice other than her own or her brothers', unless you counted those robots, which she didn't.

Ferb, at the steering setup of the hovercraft, rotated it in the air, until they were facing the direction the voice had come from.

At the other end of the street, with a flashlight and some kind of long black object to thick around to be anything smaller than a rocket launcher, stood a man. The light of the flashlight shining in her eyes made it hard to tell just what he looked like, but he seemed to be wearing some kind of camouflage gear - although it was so tattered and torn it looked as if it had come fresh from a war zone. The man continued walking towards them.

"Hey! Who are you? This part of the city is blocked off while we drain the toxic chemical vats from the second and third wings! Don't you know that? You could've been killed being over here. And what the _heck_ is that thing?"

Candace could sense Phineas about to say something, but knew that whatever it was, it probably would be unwise in the current situation. Gushing out with positivity and friendliness wasn't always the best thing to do in strange places. So she jumped in before he could.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't realize - hey!"

The man had reached the hovercraft and shined his flashlight directly into her face, temporarily blinding her. Even through the overbearing light, however, she saw his face blanch over with... fear?

"I'm sorry, sir!" he suddenly said, his voice immediately shifting from 'man in charge' to 'child outside principal's office'. He hastily snuffed out his flashlight, leaving just the rocket engine's soft glow to brighten the street.

"I'm sorry, sir." he apologized again. "I didn't recognize you at first. I was just patrolling like you dispatched me to, and you didn't say that you'd be here, as well, and..."

He grit his teeth and cut himself off. Candace raised one eyebrow. What on earth was he on about?

"Hey," Phineas said from behind her. "Do you know where we can get ahold of some Pizzazium Infinionite? Just a few grams'll be enough."

She winced, but the man looked over her brothers and seemed to have no problem with the question.

"I - I'm not sure. There might be some back at HQ, I guess, if we scavenged any, but you'd have to ask somebody who works _at_ Salvage for that information."

"O-" Candace reached back with her good arm and grabbed ahold of Phineas's shoulder, cutting him off.

The longer they talked with this guy, the more chance they ran of having him notice that they were not whoever he thought they were. The rocket launcher - or whatever it was - resting on his shoulder would tear up their fragile little hovercraft in an instant, and probably do similarly nasty things to them.

"Well, we're just gonna get right out of here now," she said, offering her best smile of innocence. The man's attention snapped back to her, and he reached up and made a crisp salute.

"Yes, sir!" After he moment, he continued. "Will I be seeing you again in this area, sir?"

"Noooo," she replied. "We're leaving right now, I promise."

"Yes, sir. I'll be returning to my patrol, then?" It was pronounced as a question, almost as if he was asking Candace's permission.

"Uh." She stumbled over her words. "Uh, yeah. You do that."

"Yes, sir!" he saluted again, then turned away and began striding back down the street where he had come.

Sinking back down into a sitting position on the floating metal platform, she heaved a huge breath of relief.

Ferb turned back to the control panel without a word, and the hovercraft began smoothly drifting in the opposite direction.

"That... was kind of odd," Phineas said at last.

"It was _close_ ," she made a point of saying. "I have a feeling if he hadn't gotten the idea I'm somebody who I'm not, then it would have gone very differently."

"Who did he mistake you for?" Phineas wondered. "He called you 'sir'. Maybe he thought you were his boss." She had a short chuckle.

"Maybe. Just be glad he got as confused as he did. I would say that the darkness obscured my face? - but he shined that flashlight right into my eyes, so I don't know what happened in his head."

"Who knows? We got lucky."

Candace settled back, leaning against the pile of boxes containing the dimensional plane transporter parts. It had been a really, really long day, with entirely too many near-death experiences for her liking. She let out a yawn, and stared up the sky, dotted with millions of tiny, twinkling stars. It was always the same, wasn't it? No matter where you traveled, the night sky would always be the same. Well, not _exactly_ the same, but the point remained.

People in general were so small compared to the vastness of the multiverse. Maybe Phineas and Ferb's approach to life was right after all. Why should you get upset over bad things happening, when even the worst case scenario was just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things? Sleepiness dragged her down into its grasp. After all that had happened, she _was_ just a teenager, and like everyone else, needed some sleep.

No doubt Phineas and Ferb were equally tired, but that fact was soon lost into the oblivion.

* * *

With a sudden start, Linda Flynn-Fletcher sat bolt upright in bed. It was well past midnight, and even the crickets outside had long since gone to sleep. But her intuition was telling her something was wrong, even in the depths of the otherwise peaceful night. Something was very wrong. Turning slightly in the bed, she shook awake her unwilling husband.

"Lawrence, listen, wake up!"

"Hmm rmmm mm?" he mumbled, not entirely awakened yet.

"Lawrence," she said, voice clouding over with fear. "Where are our children?"


	12. Just Get Out of Town

For a while after the strange encounter in the street, Phineas sat quietly behind me as I piloted the hovercraft through the streets of the city in the other dimension. The silence was warm and comfortable for me, and I although I didn't begrudge it, it was rather out of the ordinary for my brother - and to a lesser but still large extent, my sister.

When a strange noise came from behind me, I looked over my shoulder, and witnessed a rather amusing scene. The warm red glow of the powerful rocket engine lit upon Candace slumped down, leaning back on the stack of boxes filled with supplies, fast asleep. She snorted quietly and shifted gently in her sleep, leaning heavily against Phineas, who had taken it upon himself sit next to her and be sure she didn't accidentally bang her injured arm in her sleep due to the rocking of the hovercraft. Phineas felt my gaze and smiled at me, mouthing something that I couldn't quite make out in the dim light. I shook my head at him, and returned to my assigned job as pilot.

Where were we even going? I was the pilot of the hovercraft, and I didn't know. We needed Pizzazium Infinionite, that much was obvious. Once we had some, we could build an inter-dimensional transporter, and be on our way home. Now, it was pretty clear that we most likely wouldn't find any of the fascinating element just sort of hovering around like we were. We should probably build some kind of pizzazium tracker, capable of picking up on the element's uniquely high ambient energy radiation and leading us directly to it.

Such a thing would be cheap and easy to build, and would be an immense help. I'd have to bring it up to Phineas and Candace in the morning. I guess that right at that moment, I was supposed to be finding a place for us to park and rest for the night. I had no idea were was a safe enough place; what with this being an entirely different plane of reality and all. The man we had run into had claimed some sort toxic chemical draining process going on around here, so I was mainly just steering a course for _away_. I had no particular location in mind, of course, but _away_ seemed like a good enough place, as arbitrary as it was.

A city was usually a pretty decent spot to crash a plane near, because it normally meant that you could find plenty of amenities and services, and plenty of people to tell you how to get to them. This city, however, was quite different from an other I'd ever seen. Even the underwater city of Atlantis had been more lively than this place, and it had most definitely been more colorful. Heck, the non-dimension beyond time and space had more colorful and inviting than this place. Besides the lone guy we'd run into, there was absolutely no sign of life of any kind. Did anyone even live here?

Well, the man's statement about toxic chemicals had somewhat cleared up why there were no people here, but did nothing to explain the dull gray paint job of the place. I steered the hovercraft past a what appeared to be a train station. The trains weren't running; instead, they were sitting quietly on the tracks, just as lifeless as anything else around here. And they weren't like any trains I had ever seen.

There long rows of hook-like protrusions on the side (didn't they realize that those would negatively affect the aerodynamics of such a vehicle?), and their appeared to be a face plastered on the fronts. It was an interesting face, and made for an interesting train. I won't say _ugly_ , because I'm sure it was somebodies' face, and I've seen plenty of uglier things in my lifetime, but it was certainly ... unique. The long, pointed nose extended to a surprising length, making me wonder if it was some kind of caricature or something.

Odd trains aside, I took the train _tracks_ as an opportunity to more easily navigate the rows of strange streets in the city of the other dimension. I cranked the height on the hovercraft up to its maximum limit, around fifteen feet in the air. This height would allow me to safely steer the craft through the air above the train tracks. If someone should start up the trains, and send one towards us, it would be able to pass beneath us, without so much as a scrape on the bottom of our craft.

It'd probably be pretty loud, but the allure of being able to follow the tracks on the direct route through town they took overcame the chance of that in my mind. I just wanted to get us to someplace were I could see people, or even signs of people. Once I did, I'd be able to stop the hovercraft for night, content that we were out of the dangerous area that had supposedly been evacuated.

Time ticked by, and the moon rose higher and higher into the sky as I followed the train tracks through town. Phineas had long since fallen asleep, and although he had wanted to take turns driving, I'd told I could handle it. After all, he'd had the worst shifts last night, so I felt somewhat gratified when he relented and slept, likewise leaning on the boxes for support. It seemed a somewhat strange oversight that we hadn't packed any bedding or anything of that sort. I suppose it never really occurred to me that we might be in this dimension for longer than just a handful of hours.

Constant use of the Molecular Re-atomizer in the non-dimension had spoiled us, I guess, and we hadn't really thought about the vast amount of power it took to run. Convenience always comes at a price, and for the Re-atomizer, that price is power, and a high price it is. The mountains and mountains of nuclear reactors Phineas and I had hooked up to supply power for it had taken up almost the entirety of an underground room that was over ten miles cubed in size.

Around me, the scenery changed, and rather abruptly. The rows and rows of drab gray buildings gave way to a much more colorful and inviting place. Tall towers reached up to the sky, decked out in bright paint schemes such as red and pink. The roads here were much wider, and there were islands in the streets, from which grew small trees - the first sign on large plant life I'd seen here. The walls of the buildings were plastered liberally with the same face as was on the front of the stationary trains back at the station.

Many of the pictures had been vandalized, in fact, there were probably more vandalized that not. As I looked the new buildings over while the hovercraft slowly hummed past them, I realized that a lot more than just painted on pictures had been vandalized. Windows were shattered, and the doors were missing, leaving gaping frames. From my perch at the joystick of the hovercraft up in the air, and due to the darkness, I couldn't see many small details, but anyone could tell the place had been roughed up badly. It looked as if it had been looted by an angry mob of some sort.

_Maybe a ghost mob_. I thought, remembering the amazing illusion we'd seen at last Halloween at that kid Russel's house. What was his last name? I'd never seen him before that Halloween, and never again after, so I guess it didn't matter. Either way - this place definitely didn't seem safe to stay in for the night. I pushed the joystick down a little harder than before, although the power limiter we'd placed on the rocket nullified my attempt to get us moving faster. Fifteen miles an hour was the maximum it could go, which wasn't that much faster than the speed someone could run. But without seat belts or safety rails, we couldn't have it go faster anyway, especially not which people sleeping on the back of it.

Even though I knew it was slow for a reason, it was still growing to irk me. The night was no longer new, and I was growing tired. My decision to ride along the rail track had most likely drastically cut our travel time but it was still almost eleven thirty and I'd had no success. Was it too much to ask to happen upon the place in this city where people lived? Even as I was contemplating attempting to get the hovercraft on top of one of the nearby buildings, however, the issue was resolved. It wasn't exactly in the manner I would have preferred, but beggars can't be choosers and all that.

The rail track I was following took a rather gradual turn to the left, and the city's buildings and such just stopped. A thick concrete wall topped with coils of barbed wire straddled the sudden transition from pavement to grass and trees. And these trees weren't little like the decorative ones from just a few minutes ago. They were full-size trees, clustering thickly together, smothering out the moonlight's attempts to penetrate the canopy.

Signs decorated the border wall every so often, reading : **City Limits! Do Not Cross**. The way the roads and buildings just sort of ended was so marked that it looked somewhat like the edge of a movie set. The train track ran through a gate in the wall, continuing for an unknown distance into the trees beyond the wall.  I was curious as to where it went, but I wasn't about to bother trying to figure it out tonight. The hovercraft glided smoothly over the wall, and I steered it towards the trees. Of course, there was no way that it could go high enough to clear the treetops, so instead, I carefully slid under them, picking a path through the trunks until we were just out of eye shot of the city, sheltered from any possible prying eyes by the densely clustered branches and leaves.

Slotting the hovercraft into park, I disabled the rocket engine, and the red glow brightening the area faded, until our craft was lit only by the extremely faint green glow from the hovering mechanism on its underside. I put the hover system into low power mode, and it settled down into a comfortable ten feet above the ground, ready to stay there for the night.

Turning around, I was again faced with the problem of finding somewhere to sleep. Space to move about or lay down in the craft was rather limited, and with Phineas and Candace already taking up more than they should have, there really was not enough left for me. I carefully took the four or five steps to the back end of the craft, and opened a supply box, taking care not to rouse either of them. Phineas was normally a sound sleeper, but you could never be too careful when it came to these things.

As I went through the box, looking for something on which to recline, I at last came across a huge roll of Phineas' ten-ply toilet paper from the bathroom floor of the skyscraper in the non-dimension. The stuff was as thick as a blanket, and almost as soft as one, with the added benefit of being flushable. If someone ever needed to flush a blanket down the toilet, well, we'd have them all set. I pulled the roll out of the box, and took it back with me to the front of the craft. Propping it against the steering joystick mount, I shoved my sibling's legs over to the left and made room for myself.

My meddling made Phineas jerk and grunt in his sleep, but it had to be done. I have to admit, I'd never thought I would be going to sleep on a roll of toilet paper. Of all the things I've done, this was one thing I can confidently say I never saw coming. As I lay on my back, looking up at the thick, leafy, branches weaving together above me, I was struck with just how similar this dimension was to our own; on the surface at least. For the all strange things and differences, it was a lot of the same.

I knew that Theory of Everything posits that the closer the dimensions are in the totality of space-time, the closer alike they tend to be, almost (but not quite) reaching the point at which they are both the same. I guess the sameness was a good thing then: it had a strong chance of meaning that our dimension was just a few planes of reality away. Of course, our plane could be hundreds or even millions of planes away, and the familiarity all just coincidence, but... meh.

As I was sleepily turning all this over in my tired brain, I became aware of a single ray of moonlight that managed to make it through the dense treetops. It shone down directly on my shoe, and I watched as the wind softly swayed the branches back and forth, causing the small patch of less-dark darkness to grow and shrink and size. The repetitive motions made my eyes grow heavy, and before long, I had fallen asleep.

* * *

I woke the next morning to Phineas leaning over top of me, trying reach the small control panel without waking me.

"Oh!" he said softly, when he saw my eyes open. "Did I wake you up? Sorry." I just shook my head and took his extended hand, pulling myself up into a sitting position. I stretched briefly, and my eyes opened wide in amusement when I saw a long, wide wet streak running down the side of Phineas's shirt.

"Don't even say a word," he said, following my eyes. He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder towards Candace, who was still fast asleep. I didn't laugh, but the situation was still entirely too funny to escape _some_ kind of reaction.

"Did enjoy your swimming lessons last night?" I asked. Phineas rolled his eyes at me and smiled.

"Just be glad I decided to take one for the team - it could have just as easily been me up here on the toilet paper," he replied. Oh, right. I picked myself up and straightened out my now-rumpled clothing.

"Can I get to the control panel?" Phineas asked, motioning past me. I stepped aside to allow him to reach it. He rapidly brought the hovering system out of passive mode and slowly let the hovercraft sink towards the ground, stopping a few inches short of actually touching it. What was he planning to do? I watched as he hopped down from the craft, and disappeared into the woods. Oh. Well, duh.

A few moments later, he reappeared, and gave me a thumbs up.

"So, where is this place in relationship with that city from last night?" he asked. I indicated with my hands the distance I'd taken the hovercraft last night. It wasn't far - perhaps a couple thousand feet or so. He watched me for a minute, then spoke again.

"Well, that's convenient. Maybe now that it's daylight, more people will be out and about. How do you think we should go about this?" He didn't have to specify what he meant by _this_ \- I knew what was meant.

The search for Pizzazium Infinionite was issue number one for us right now. It was pretty much the only issue, actually. But, my idea from last night was still in mind. An energy detector would make the hunt much easier. Pizzazium's unique radiative signature was pretty easy to track, and could be detected from quite a long distance, even through multiple layers of lead and concrete. Phineas seemingly read my mind, as he so often did. Only my brother can do it the way he does - and to this day, I still haven't quite figured out how he does it. Am I really that expressive? Apparently so.

"That's an awesome idea!" he exclaimed. "Ferb, I ... " he suddenly cut himself off, as Candace snorted and shifted in her sleep. When she was still again, he resumed, albeit a notch quieter.

"I know what we're going to do this morning!" He smiled, and I gave a thumbs up. My stomach complained, and it seemed quite loud in compared to our fairly quiet arboreal surroundings.

"I'll second that." he answered my unspoken statement, "Let's eat first. Then we can begin the hunt. Maybe Candace will be up by then too."

Yeah, that was plenty likely. I fished out my phone and checked the time. It was ten minutes past six. If my past experience was any indication, you wouldn't be able to drag her from her sleep with the eight foot rocket engine attached to our hovercraft for another good hour. Nevertheless, I returned the roll of toilet paper that had been my pillow to it's box, and fished around in the other boxes for the food we'd brought along. After a few minutes of searching, I was able to produce the container of pancake mix. Our syrup had been lost in the crash, but butter and whipped cream would be more than enough to replace the loss. Phineas was also digging through the boxes, and produced a toolbox, and various miscellaneous parts. We were doing all of this as absolutely quietly as possible, which made for a few inconveniences, but they were minor and easily dealt with.

As Phineas put together the energy detector, I restarted the rocket engine, and cooked pancakes on the heated metal exterior. It worked flawlessly, although they did tend to slide back and forth a little bit. We sat on the side of the hovercraft, legs dangling off the edge, and ate the rocket pancakes, which were quite good. Several times Candace shifted in her sleep, but she never woke, as I had expected. I sealed up two extra pancakes in a plastic bag, and left them on a box next to her, were she would be sure to see them when she did finally wake up.

"So," Phineas asked. "I guess it's time for the fun to begin!"

It was indeed. We had the full day before us, and only one goal in mind : finding the ever-elusive Pizzazium. It was unfortunate that there was no local Super Duper Mega Superstore outlet around here, where you could pick up the stuff for sixty five thousand a gram, which was a steal. If you were lucky there'd be a two-for-one deal. We always made sure to stock up on those days.

Phineas started up the energy detector, and held it up as the small antenna mounted on the hand-held device scanned the area. A subdued humming was coming from the little machine, but at last it locked on to an unusually strong signature and pointed us in the appropriate direction. Phineas squinted at the small display as if in disbelief.

"Come check this out," he said, holding it up so I could see it. It was quite odd - it was reading off of an energy signature just a hundred feet away, that was roughly equivalent to what you'd expect of Pizzazium, except with an entirely different wavelength pattern. I turned a questioning gaze to him.

"I'm sure it's working properly," he assured me. "I did literally just build it right now." I knew that, obviously. I'd been standing not ten feet away when he'd done so. Well, there was only to figure out just what it was reading. I pointed in the direction that peculiar reading was supposedly coming from.

"Should we take the hovercraft or just walk?" he asked me. I thought for a moment. A hundred feet was a tiny distance - easily in earshot, and only out of eye shot because of the trees all around us. I'd hate to wake up Candace by moving the hovercraft for such a small trip. I could tell that Phineas was having the same thought process that I was.

"Well, I hate to leave her alone again," he said, "but we'll only be a few minutes, and what's a hundred feet, right?" I nodded, confirming. He glanced around.

"Alright, let's go. But, before we do..." He produced a sticky notepad and pen from a nearby box and scribbled something down, then tore off the note, and gingerly stuck it to Candace's sling. Then he hopped down the craft, and I followed, pausing only momentarily to pick up a collapsible shovel just in case.

The walk through the woods was short - about a hundred feet. The thick forest concealed the hovercraft from us, but we could still hear the humming from the engine as it hovered above the ground. We followed the detector until it led us to a small pile of leaves. Kicking them aside, Phineas waved the detector around.

"It's right here." he said. "Just about a foot under the ground." He glanced back up at me. "It's to bad we don't have ... " Before he could finish, I pulled the collapsible shovel out and showed it to him. He flashed a smile.

"Oh, awesome! Always two steps ahead, huh?" I smiled slightly and unfolded the metal tool. I'd anticipated just such a moment as this. It wasn't such a leap of logic to guess that a radiant energy source almost as strong as pizzazium that was a mere hundred feet away and still not visible was buried under or in something. If it had been just lying on top of the soil, chances are I'd have seen it glowing through the trees last night. Of course, it probably wasn't pizzazium, but still, what could it have been?

I dug into the loose topsoil of the forest, tossing it aside, until the shovel end clanged against something hard. Jackpot. I scraped the shovel across the top of the metal object, until I got the blade under the side of it. Using it as lever, I pried it from the earth. It was a box - square and pretty nondescript. Phineas tucked the energy detector into his pocket and brushed some of the loose dirt off of the object.

"It's got hinges on this side," he pointed out. "It must open." I set the shovel down and took the box from him, examining the hinges. They were caked with dirt as if they hadn't opened a long time.

"Look," he said, pointing down into the hole. He bent down and pulled out another piece of metal, this one tiny. It was a lock of sorts, one had most likely been keeping the box shut, but had somehow fallen off. I ran my fingers over the surface of the box until I found the seam of the opening part. The hinges were too full of dirt and grit for me to open on my own, however, even with the lock missing.

I offered one side of it to Phineas, and he grabbed it and pulled. It was kind of hard to get a good grip on the box at all, which somewhat hampered our efforts to pry it open. However, it slowly opened up anyway, the hinges creaking loudly as they shook out dirt particles. Then, it suddenly jumped past whatever obstacle had been in it's way, and popped wide open.

The contents - a shiny yellow object - flew from the box and went sailing through the air, coming to a soft landing a few feet away on a pile of leaves. Phineas dropped his half and went to scoop it up. I checked the inside of the box. It had been designed for the object - which resembled a cup of sorts -, and the shaped interior had no other secrets to hide.

"Check it out," Phineas said, returning to my side with the odd cup. "Doesn't this remind you of something we've seen before?" I studied the object in his hand.

Now that it was still, I could see that wasn't actually yellow. Instead, it was golden. I suppose the most accurate name for it would have been 'goblet'. One handle stuck out each side of it, and intricate patterns were traced into the side. The actual cup part of it was sealed by a lid, but when it was shaken, you could hear liquid sloshing around inside. It _did_ seem familiar. But where had we seen it before? Certainly not in this dimension. It must have resembled something from our own dimension, but what? Phineas grabbed ahold of the cap and gave it a twist. It appeared to turn easily under his hand, as the lid soon popped off, revealing the contents.

A bright pink liquid that was on the verge of glowing almost entirely filled up the interior. As soon as I saw it, I instantly recognized what it must be, and I saw that Phineas had as well.

"It's - it's cutonium?" he said, turning to face me, voice filled with surprise. I nodded. It was indeed. The cold pink color radiated from the liquid, casting a strange aura on my brother's face. The distinct smell of the alien chemical wafted through the air, evoking images of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, and all things small and adorable.

"How funny," Phineas mused. "There's cutonium in this dimension as well as ours. I wonder if this dimension has its own counterpart of Meap as well." I shrugged. Maybe, and maybe not. You could never know for sure about these sorts of things.

"We can't open a dimensional rift with cutonium?" he asked. I thought about the idea for a moment. It was certainly a new idea, one neither of us had thought about before.

Cutonium is one of those things that you never think about using to power something, mainly because no matter what you did, or how long you worked, you'd never have enough. The stuff was literally the liquefied essence of cuteness - even a small drop could change something from horrendously ugly to pleasant to look at. The cup in Phineas's hand held more than I had ever seen before at one time. Even when we had excavated an almost identical cup to this in Seattle that one time, there had been far less cutonium.

Sadly, however, despite all its strange powers, dimensional rifting was still beyond the potential of the stuff. It's radiant energy wavelength was roughly the same as pizzazium's, but it was destructive rather than constructive, meaning even with an ocean of it, you could never excite gravitron frequencies high enough. In fact, the more you had, the more the apparent the problem became.

"What should we do with this then?" Phineas asked, screwing the lid back on to avoid spillage. Here was a problem. Cutonium emits a very obvious and easily traceable trail when it moves around, via technically making the space it travels through cuter through its presence alone. The traces would still be present even after thousands of years - and we had just uncorked a comparatively huge amount of it. It was as if we had broadcasted our location with a bullhorn to the entire universe.

Now, in our dimension, there had been this fellow named Mitch who had stopped at no moral boundaries to obtain our dimension's supply of cutonium. We'd managed to put a stop to him, after no shortage of mortal danger and near-death experiences. Was there someone like that here? If there was, it was not a question of _if_ they would find us, it was merely a question of _when_. Now we needed to find that Pizzazium, and quick. With it, we could travel to a place where none could follow - provided that they didn't understand the workings of spacetime.

Phineas handed me the cup, which was surprisingly heavy for its small size. He pulled out the energy detector and fiddled around with it for a moment or two.

"Alright," he said, looking up. "I've got it locked onto the signature of what appears to be some pizzazium. It's about ten or so miles away." _Ten miles_? That would take the better part of an hour to cover in the speed-limited hovercraft. Well, it looked like the speed limiter had to go.

"We can use some of the supplies that we intended for the dimensional rifter for safety restraints, and then remove the speed inhibitor," Phineas said, as we turned and began the short walk back to the craft. Candace was still asleep - but that was very likely about to end. This time, the racket couldn't be helped, however. My brother and I broke open the supplies for the rifter, and began building up walls and a roof onto the tiny hovercraft platform. The noise of our construction jarred our sister awake, much to her disapproval.

"Mmmmm ugh -Wh - what's going on?" she asked, yawning, and wiping away the traces of sleep from her face. "Ugh. My arm is so stiff."

"We're moving up our plans," Phineas answered, pausing momentarily in the middle of sealing in the windshield. "We accidentally uncorked a bottle of Cutonium, and it's probably best we get out of this dimension before anybody comes looking for it." I had set the cup down on the console of the hovercraft, and he picked it up and showed it to her.

"Ah," she said, blinking rapidly and yawning again. "Cutonium. Cutonium. Isn't that the stuff that Meap or whoever was after?"

"More or less."

I welded the last panel onto the roof, and the rest of the conversation was lost to me. Sliding down from the domed roof, I scooped up my toolbox and rounded the back of the craft, setting to work removing the speed limitation device. It was only a few minutes, and before long, the small metal device was back in my hand. I closed the service panel on the side of the engine, and walked back around to the side of the craft, reaching up to the door on the newly added wall.

Stepping inside, I could again hear the conversation going on between the two of them.

"Yup. The signal's coming from about ten miles away," Phineas was saying.

"What? That close? So we're basically home free, then?"

"Well, not a _hundred_ percent certain - we don't know what is ten miles away, you know?"

"I guess so."

"Don't worry! I'm sure it'll be fine. We only need a gram or two now that we've already gotten back inside the continuum."

"Mmm hmm."

I put my toolbox down underneath the seats that were now taking up the little space inside the cabin. Candace turned to me.

"You think it'll go okay?" she asked. I shrugged - not knowing for sure either way.

"Of course it will!" Phineas interjected. "Ferb, are you finished with the outside?" I nodded.

"Awesome! Let's get in the air. You want to fly or should I?" I shook my head slightly, indicating that I would prefer the latter.

"Sounds good. Well, buckle up, folks. I know where we're going to go today!" He turned and sat in the pilot's seat. Candace and I followed his example, taking extra care to be sure the buckles were securely fastened. As I sat, I wondered where the Cutonium container had gone. I looked over at Candace, but she only smiled at me turned back to face out the window.

"Where is the Cutonium?" I asked her. Her head snapped around to face me when she heard me speak.

"Uh..." she drawled, "I don't think I ever actually saw it." Phineas overheard us from the cockpit.

"I stuck it in the box with the rest of the liquids," he said over his shoulder. Ah.

Wait, should we even be taking it? What were we going to do with it anyway? Leaving it here, out in the woods may have been the better choice. But what if it fell into the wrong hands? The amount in that cup had been enough - My doubts and second thoughts as to the wisdom of this course of action were drowned out by a roar from the rocket engine. Even through the layers of muffling, now that it was revving up to full power, it was incredibly loud. The small craft shook about, and through the windows I saw it rising away from the ground.

This time around, it rose far above the treetops, easily a thousand or so feet into the air. Phineas pushed the joystick forwards, and the engine rumbled even more loudly than before.

With a tremendous noise, the hovercraft took off at immense speeds, slicing through the air above the forest and train tracks. It took a few moments for me to adjust to the speed, and be able to sit forwards comfortably. Outside, I could see one edge of the city close by. It's not often that one can use the word 'edge' to describe a city, but this one surely merited it.

The concrete wall that marked the border had cement and pavement right up to it on the inside, and nothing but dirt and grass outside. In the light of the morning sun, I could see that the barbed wire perched on top the walls was slanted inwards, as if it had been built to keep people inside. The wire wasn't clean either - scattered up and down the length of the wall were sections stained red with what I told myself must be rust, but I knew was wrongly-colored to actually be so. Just what was going in this strange alternate city? I had a feeling that it would do well if we never found out. Ignorance is bliss, and all that.

The hovercraft leaned to the right as Phineas banked it into the direction of the city. The more of the place I saw by the daylight the more I felt as if we should not be here. But, the pizzazium was here, and we were pretty much being forced to follow the material wherever it showed up. We flew along for a few more minutes, following the signal on the detector.

The ten mile distance to the frequency location was covered in mere minutes. We gradually slowed, and eventually stopped in mid-air, hovering above the same place I had flown past last night - the part of the city that could have been considered normal, had it not been for the rampant destruction had apparently struck it like a tornado.

Yet, just like with the rest of the city, the light of day revealed an entirely different scene. The place was no longer abandoned: instead, the streets beneath us were crawling with people. They were working in unison like so many ants, emptying the buildings around them of everything, painting over the faces pictured on the walls, and in one place, stripping down an actual wall. I watched as three of them struggled to push a large couch through a set of doors. It was strange, because although they _were_ systematically tearing apart this part of the city, it was done so... _systematically_. Didn't anybody live here, to be upset when they got home to find it razed to the ground?

Half of the people down below were dressed in ratty, tattered camouflage uniforms resembling the one on the man we'd run into last night. The other half were wearing these dull, gray overall-type things. That was pretty much the only outfits being worn down there.

Phineas unstrapped himself from the pilot's seat and stood up.

"If the detector is accurate, then we will find the pizzazium somewhere beneath us."

"With all those people?" Candace asked nervously.

Her question was somewhat reflective my own thoughts. We'd already had one run-in with the people of this dimension, and only a lucky case of mistaken identity had let us get away with it. I wouldn't normally be so concerned about running into people, but the entirely weird vibe that the city gave off was incredibly off-putting. The atmosphere of the place was one of 'you shouldn't be here' and I don't know if it was just the city, or perhaps the fact we were in another dimension that was the cause of it. As was usual, however, the uneasiness that Candace and I were feeling about this place flew completely over our brother's head.

"Come on, don't worry so much. I'm sure they'll be happy to help. I mean, they're pretty much tearing the place apart as it is now. Heck, they might even just straight up give it to us if we ask."

Well, that was most likely not going to be the way it went down. But, he was right: what real reason did we have to be worried? Aside from the strange appearance of the place there was no _concrete_ reason. Sure, the drab paint and barbed wire walls were off putting. But, this _was_ another dimension, as familiar as it mostly seemed. Ergo, things would feel different.

There really was no cause for alarm, in fact, there were probably perfectly mundane solutions for all the things we saw. And last night's incident, well, the man _did_ say there was hazardous chemical drain going on. No wonder he had wanted us out of there. Maybe I was just jumping to conclusions. Phineas was staring, waiting for me to indicate my thoughts. I smiled briefly. He was right. Ockham's razor, right? The simpler route was generally better. Don't try to complicate things if you don't have to. I gave him a thumbs up.

"Then lets go!" he exclaimed, stepping back to the control panel.

Candace looked at me, and I could see the nervousness in her face. But, there was no real reason to be worried right now, other than appearances. Everyone knows the saying 'don't judge a book by it's cover'. It'd do her good to save her nerves until we found a real reason to worry.

The hovercraft's engines rumbled, and it began slowly lowering downwards, towards the busy street. I watched as the first person pointed upwards at our craft. Then everyone looked up, and people scattered to be out from underneath us. The gray overall-wearing people fled inside the buildings, faces marked with terror that was so obvious I could see it from the air. The ones in the torn military uniforms also backed away, but they didn't run and hide. Instead, they took cover behind the various objects they piled in the street, and watched as we descended. Several of them drew guns, aiming at our craft. That was rather unsettling, but I suppose it was a reasonable reaction to what they saw as an unmarked aircraft randomly deciding land in front of them.

Just a few feet before actually touching the asphalt, we stopped. The soldiers (as I now assumed they were), sat crouched behind their cover, watching us. Now that we were closer, I could see that even through their battered combat gear and rusty weapons, fear also marked their faces, paling skin and shaking their aim. Just who did they think we were that everyone was acting so frightened? Were flying harbingers of fear and destruction that common around here?

"Uh, guys?" Candace said from her window. "I think we may have... overestimated the friendliness of these people."

"Nonsense!" Phineas declared. "We just need to show that we don't mean any harm." Her face scrunched up, as if at a bad memory, and she reached out to stop Phineas from opening the hovercraft door. But she had to use the wrong arm, and so missed her opportunity. He thrust the door open, and hopped down onto the ground outside.

"Hey!" he called, waving at them. "I'm Phineas Flynn. How are you all doing today?"

The change that spread through the soldiers was instantaneous and both amazing and scary. As soon they saw him, the fear instantly left them, and they lowered their weapons and began standing up. Phineas saw it too, and took it as opportunity to further extend his advances.

"I'd like you to meet my brother and sister, too!" he gestured back inside the hovercraft, motioning for us to come out. Well, I was the one who had decided that it would be okay to come down here in the first place. I stepped past Candace and jumped down next Phineas, giving a small wave at them.

Phineas paused and looked back inside the aircraft.

"Come on Candace!" he said. "It's alright." She hesitated a moment longer, then stepped outside.

Another shocking change spread across the soldiers standing around, as soon as they laid eyes on her. It was strongly reminiscent of the reaction the man had had last night. They snapped to attention, and their hands shot up in crisp salutes. Candace looked around nervously.

"Come on, say hi!" Phineas whispered at her, poking her with his elbow.

"Uh ... hi? I'm Candace." No one answered, their postures locked rigidly in salutes.

"I think they are waiting for you to salute back," Phineas whispered. So, she gave a half-hearted salute with her left hand, and immediately they all relaxed. One of them walked up us.

"What are you doing here, sir?" he asked. "I was informed that you were going to be at the southeast sector." The question was so off base, and yet so in line the way everyone was reacting to my sister, I began to suspect that Candace just may have some sort of doppelgänger in this dimension. It was now broad daylight, so there was no chance that this was a mere case of mistaken identity, especially not with the amount of soldiers standing around. Not one of them offered a doubt as to her identity, and yet they were all mistaking her for someone else.

Candace's eyes had gotten wide. "I, uh, I..." she stammered out.

Phineas looked at them both. "I think you have her mistaken for someone else," he said, "This is my sister, Candace-"

"-Flynn. Second in command of the Tri-State Militia, since there's nothing to resist anymore. I know this. She's my direct superior." the man finished his sentence. He turned back to Candace. "I understand if that information is classified. My apologies, sir." He turned away.

"Waaait," Phineas said. "We're from a diff-" Candace grabbed ahold of his shoulder, cutting him off mid sentence.

"Yeah, that's totally me," she stammered out, her voice high and cracking. "Second-in-command. Totally. Heh." The man looked at her with a questioning gaze.

"Do you need something?" he asked. Phineas shook off Candace's hand and stepped forwards.

"We need about two and half grams of pizzazium infinionite. Our frequency detector led us here. Are you willing to trade for it?"

"I'm sorry, kid" he said apologetically. "We're under orders to help civilians based on necessity. You aren't dying, and have a, uh, flying... thing, so you'll probably be close to last on the list. Direct orders from ... well" and he gestured towards Candace.

"I said that?" Candace said. "I mean, I said that! I did." I could tell she wasn't at all comfortable with the whole 'mistaken identity' thing, but yet she'd not wanted Phineas to share the truth.

The man looked at her, confused.

"Yes, sir," he said slowly. "Those _are_ still our operating orders, right?"

"Uh, yeah." she said. Then, her face lit up. "I mean, no! Wait, yeah. I - I now, uh, hereby solemnly command - no, order you to give us some pizzazium infinionite - first." Her bluff was about at transparent as pane of glass, and the guilty smile she offered only served to cement that fact. Yet, not even a shadow of doubt crossed the man's face, further proving my doppelgänger theory. There was absolutely no way a simple mistaken identity could survive Candace's stammered speech and awful bluff attempts.

Phineas was looking her, face covered in questions. Something was bothering him.

"Yes, sir!" the man saluted. He turned back to face the soldiers standing around. "You heard the boss! We got new orders! Bring the radioactive material safe! I want it here yesterday! Get to work!"

The stillness was shattered as the soldiers burst into hustle and bustle, scurrying to and fro. Four of them brought up a huge metal safe, and sat it down next to us. They hastily spun the dial back and forth, and swung the door open. Brilliant green glow poured from the interior. I felt my worries of getting what we needed melt away in the warm and soothing light of the pizzazium infinionite. There was _so_ much. More than enough to get us home. Wherever they were getting the stuff from, there was an absolute ton - easily a pound or two.

"That's a _lot_ of pizzazium," Phineas breathed. Candace nodded mutely.

"How much do you want, sir?"

"That - that's good."

"Yes, sir."

The man left us, walking back to the group of uniformed people standing around. He made a motion with his hand, and the people in the gray overalls, the ones who had run into buildings when we landed, began trickling out again.

"It's all good!" he shouted. "They're with us!" The trickle sped up, and soon the street was busy again. They paid us pretty much no attention, mostly resuming the destructive processes we had observed from the air. I watched, curious, they piled up object after object from the insides of the buildings around in the street, sometimes carrying them away, and sometimes setting them down and going back in for more. Whoever all this stuff actually belonged to was not going to be happy. Oh, well. It wasn't any of my business, I suppose.

"How about _that_?" Candace said. "Now we can go home! Pretty smart, am I right?"

"I wonder how that guy knew your name," Phineas said meditatively.

"Who cares? I don't. Let's just get out of here before whoever they think I am _actually_ shows up." She reached inside the safe and grabbed up one of the glass tubes of pizzazium.

"This looks an awful lot like that lantern I saw at the Super Duper Mega Superstore one time," she muttered. "Come on guys! I can't carry much with one hand."

"Okay," Phineas replied, still not satisfied with the lack of answers to his question. "Let's make like a banana and invert our molecules through the space time continuum!" He looked at me, and I gave him a thumbs up. Our time had come. Stepping forwards, I grabbed up an armful of the glass tubes with the brightly glowing solution to our problems. There wasn't much space in the hovercraft, so we piled them on the floor underneath the seats.

"Goodbye and farewell!" Phineas called out to the workers, as we made the last trip. Only a few heads turned, and nobody thought to return the gesture.

"Alright guys," he said to us, as he pulled shut the hovercraft's door. "Let's just fly somewhere out of the way, like that forest, where we can safely tear apart this thing to build a dimensional transporter. Sound like a plan to you?"

"Phineas," Candace said. He raised his eyebrows.

"Something wrong?" She smiled broadly.

"Phineas, I know what we're going to do today!" Phineas laughed for a moment.

"Oh do you now? Well, we'd better get on it then." He stepped up to the pilots seat, and turned on the engine. "Buckle up everybody!"

Taking care not to step on any of the pizzazium containers on the floor, I sat down and strapped in. Candace did the same, and the engine belched loudly.

The hovering manifold built into the floor vibrated slightly, as it powered up, lifting our craft up into the sky. It rose straight up until the tops of even the highest skyscrapers were several hundred feet below. The rocket engine spluttered for just a moment, then began rumbling loudly. It was ready.

With a frighteningly loud shock wave, the hovercraft shot through the air. I felt the force of inertia pushing me back into my seat. The roaring of the engine instantly drowning any would-be attempts to talk. A sixteen foot long blue flame licked from the exhaust, propelling us along at only slightly subsonic speeds. In only a few moments, we'd left the city behind, and were once again soaring through the air over the trees beyond its limits.

Phineas manipulated the controls, and the rocket engine gradually quieted, slowing down the craft as it's main method of horizontal propulsion weakened. The air brakes mounted on the front of the craft jumped into action, quickly bringing us to a full stop in mid air. Only the subtle humming of the hovering manifold could be heard, as it held us aloft. There was a slight 'catching' sound, and we began gently drifting towards the ground.

The craft slowly lowered down until the tops of the trees began brushing against it's bottom. The hovering manifold latched onto the surface of the green canopy as a surface and stabilized above it, bringing us to a full stop. We floated gently through the air, looking for a place to set down, until at last a large enough clearing presented itself. Phineas disabled the hovering manifold's self-stabilization and brought us down to the ground. The landing wasn't the smoothest - hovercraft aren't supposed to actually touch the ground, after all. We struck the ground with a considerable jolt, and went skidding forwards a few feet before eventually grinding to a halt, spewing up huge dirt clouds. Well, it was time to get to work.

Phineas unstrapped from the pilot's seat.

"We've reached our destination" he said. "We're far enough away from the city that no one will be able to see what we do, and and the hovercraft's grounded."

Candace sprang out her seat in a hurry. "Let's do this, then!" she exclaimed.

"You betcha."

I unstrapped and stood up, picking up my toolbox. Phineas led the way, as he often did, opening the door and being the first outside. Well, our hovercraft had served purpose well, but it was no longer needed. We set to taking it apart, and using the parts to put together a dimensional rifter. Not every piece was needed, but enough were that the hovercraft was no longer recognizable. In its place stood a tall metal box with a satellite dish mounted on the end. Thick gray hoses connected the base of the box to a small reactor, which would power the rift for us to get home.

Where just a few hours ago, we had once lacked pizzazium, now we had an abundance. I carefully inserted the glass tubes into the reactor, and the sound of high-energy production had never sounded so sweet to my ears.

"Hey," Phineas said, causing all eyes to snap to him. "It's been like six days since we fell through the rift originally, right?"

I nodded, and Candace replied with a drawn out "Yeeees?" What was he getting at?

He smiled. "Well, I just had this great idea. Since we have so much extra pizzazium now, why don't we add a quantum phase shifter to the rifter?" That w _as_ a good idea. It would solve a lot problems - the days we had all missed out on, and our parents worrying about where we had all been in the past twelve or so hours that we had been in the space time continuum, but not at home.

"And that will let us open a rift not just into our dimension, but into our dimension at a specific time?" Candace asked.

"Well, yeah! We can open a rift to six days ago in our dimension, and then it be almost as if we weren't gone at all." He was slightly underselling it - it would be _exactly_ as if we weren't gone at all. The only difference would be that he and I and Candace would still remember the things had occurred. No one else, would, and we could resume our lives right where they had been interrupted in the backyard on the last day of summer.

"You want to go back to the _last day of summer_?" Candace asked, her voice tinged with a faint tone of unwillingness.

Phineas paused briefly before answering.

"Yeah! Is something wrong?"

"I, uh, it's just that, well, you remember the time loops, don't you?"

Phineas frowned.

"No," he pointed out, "We were on the inside of them. Ergo, we couldn't perceive them. You know that." He turned to me.

"Be sure to put that on the list of words infrequently used by children, Ferb. _Ergo_. It's a nice one." I gave a slight thumbs up, but the discouraged look on Candace's face was worrying me. I gestured to her, and Phineas turned back.

"What is it?" he asked again.

"Well, I mean, I lived the last day of summer like a hundred times during the time loops, you know? I can explain and predict every little thing that happens during it, and, well, I'm sure it sounds selfish, but I really don't want to do it again." She hung her head slightly, as if embarrassed.

Phineas thought for a moment.

"Well," he said. "I suppose that we can postpone the last of summer celebration to the first day of fall." Candace perked up.

"Really? You'd do that? You don't have too, it's fine-"

"Don't worry about it, sis. There'll be plenty more summers in the future, but we only got one family. You okay with that, Ferb?" he asked me. I smiled and gave him a thumbs up. Candace seemed relieved, and that was enough to make me go along the idea. After all, for the stuff that had happened to us, she'd had it a lot worse. The cast on her arm was still a glaring white testament to that fact. So, I supposed that it would only be fair if we let her have this at least.

"Are you sure?" she asked again. "I mean, if it's really important then I guess it's okay..."

"Ah ah ah," Phineas said, turning back to the dimensional rifter. "I don't want to hear another word about it." Candace smiled.

"Alright, _mom_."

Phineas laughed and opened up the tool box, producing a miniature screwdriver.

"Let's finish building this thing," he said.

With the small break for conversation ended, work on the rifter proceeded rapidly. The new quantum mechanical addition was test-fired, and functioned flawlessly. We affixed it to the main power grid, and connected it to the meta-stable actuators in the pizziazium reactors. The pile of supplies rapidly dwindled, but, thankfully, not before we were done.

Stepping back, it was funny to me - as if I had not seen a more beautiful thing in my life. Homesickness is a downright strange thing sometimes. Then again, maybe it wasn't so strange after all.

I stepped over to the control panel, and typed out the precise co-ordinates of the point in time and space we would going.

"Friday, September 23rd, 4:00 A.M," Phineas read over my shoulder. "Sounds good. We won't have to wait hours before the sun comes up, but we can arrive home unnoticed." I nodded.

"Huh," Candace said thoughtfully. "Won't we all be, like, six days older than our birthdays seem to indicate? You know, because we lived six days, then went back to the first?" I thought about it. It was true - but couldn't be helped. Six days wasn't such a big deal anyway. No one would notice, and no bodily developments would come wildly off cycle due to less than a weeks error in time.

"Yeah!" Phineas answered. "We can be part of the SSDO club - _Secretly Six Days Older_. And, every year, we can have two birthdays! One on the date of our birth, and one six days before, when we actually turn a year older! It'll be awesome. Like our own private party - for time travelers only."

"Time travelers _and_ dimensional travelers," Candace added. "Can't forget the last one. Crazy you guys have never done anything like this before."

Phineas shrugged. "Alternate dimensions aren't really that exciting," he pointed out. "Take this one for instance. Sure, there's a handful of weird things about it, it's more or less the same as ours."

"I guess that's true," she replied. "Still, you've done a ton of stuff that wasn't that great, like crocheting or whatever that one day. Seems funny you'd do that but not this."

"I think we'd remember traveling to a second dimension if we had done so. It doesn't seem easily forgettable," I said, kind of wanting to cut the conversation short so we could get out of here. Phineas grinned.

"You're right. Plus, we've done it now, so I guess we can check it off the bucket list."

Candace smiled back at him. "I'm sure that list is plenty long, huh?"

"You have _no_ idea."

She raised her eyebrows. "Oh, I might have some."

"So you might! Well, we'll just have to see. For now - let's make like a tree and extend our rooting systems deep into the soil, soaking up nutrients and water necessary for continued growth!"

Finally.

Even though I'm not usually one to grow impatient, right at that time, his and Candace's extended conversation was eating away at my nerves. We were so close - right at the door. Why couldn't they just finish on the other side? Not hesitating a moment longer, I pulled the lever on the side of the rifter.

The pizzazium reactor roared to life, and the incredibly high energy element's internal energy was at last harnessed for our own ends. Green light leaked from the satellite dish, and a brilliantly glowing beam shot from it, slowly expanding in the air, until formed a circle. The interior of the circle flashed, once, twice, thrice, before falling away.

The afternoon sun fell through the newly opened portal, pooling on the other side. I saw the moon - I saw grass and trees. I saw a yellow house with a brown roof. I saw home. It was dark there - it was four o'clock in the morning on the first day of fall. It was home - and it was so beautiful that it took my breath away.

"Come on," Phineas said, stepping forwards and waving us on. "Let's go home!"

* * *


	13. Home Sweet Home

_Home_. That was the only thought that was in Candace's mind. _Home_. It was over. It was done. She'd done it - had broken through the unbreakable boundaries of space and time to pull her brothers back from the void beyond. It hadn't gone exactly the way she had foreseen it on the fateful Thursday when she had committed herself towards the goal, but it had gotten done nonetheless.

It was all over - and she could hardly believe it. The past six days had had some of the wildest ups and downs that she had ever experienced: hopelessness, loneliness, fear, pain and despair of a depth and intensity she had never felt before. But there had also been happy moments, seeing her brothers alive and well on the other side of the temporal rift, and she had felt the satisfaction that can only come from violating causality with a device of your own creation. A spark born of desperation and fright had ignited within her soul a fire of creativity and knowledge that burned so brightly it could never be quenched for long without flaring up again, even against her will.

As she followed Phineas, stepping through the quantum portal from the sunny afternoon in the other dimension, into the cool extremely early morning air of their home dimension, she took a deep breath and just stood still for a moment, letting the realization be driven even farther in.

_They were home_.

The world had been righted again. The errors in the space time continuum had been fixed, the future had been restored, and the past had been rewritten. Once again, she had a connection to the rest of the world. The barriers around her heart wouldn't come down overnight, of course, but they had already begun the process of breaking apart. She could reach out to people again, and they would remember, they would know about all the things she talked about.

"Candace, if you have any phone calls or text messages from the future on your phone, you should probably delete them," Phineas said from her side.

The statement, innocent though it was, was nonetheless a reminder that the world she had returned to was still not the same as it had been before the infamous last day of summer. How could it be? Spoons still did not exist, followed in kind by capris and oranges and toothpicks and a laundry list of other things.

But, those things weren't important to her. She had her brothers back, and would be perfectly content to have to go without spoons if it meant never having to travel to the dreadful non-dimension again. Eventually, someone would have a breakthrough, a brilliant idea. You could take a metal stick, and flatten the end, and make a little bowl shape out of it! You could use the bowl-on-a-stick to scoop up liquids and runny foods. Maybe they would even think to call it a 'spoon'. The world would be lit ablaze the genius of the idea. How had no one ever thought of it before? Forks had been around for almost twenty five hundred years, but not until just now had someone come up with the idea to create another fork-like utensil for liquids.

Or maybe not - maybe the idea of spoons would be laughed off, rejected. People might say: _It's always been this way!_ and _Stop trying to complicate stuff with newfangled ideas._ The concept of a spoon would be ridiculed and scorned, and ultimately forgotten about, becoming one more in the long procession of inventions that never got off the ground.

Only Candace and her brothers would ever remember the spoon, or any of the other items that had been swallowed by the rifts. Only they would be able to relate to the new compulsion in her life. And only they would believe what she said when she told them of the frightening future she had so narrowly averted. But that didn't matter. Just the two of them were plenty good enough for her.

Surely now, that everything was said and done, things could go back to normal. It was first day of fall again. Summer was officially over. Candace wasn't sure what past the space-time continuum had created for the last day of summer, but she really didn't care. School would be starting in just three days. This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday would be the last full days of freedom before school began, demanding half the day be spent in a classroom. School normally held no terror for her. She'd been going to the same school her entire life, and had grown up around the same people. This time, however, a feeling of dread began settling down in her stomach.

Though most of the world had been restored, not _everything_ was the same.

Most obvious of all, of course, was the fact that _she_ had changed. Candace Gertrude Flynn was no longer the same person she had been just six short days ago. Though outwardly she appeared the same (with the exception of her broken arm, though that would heal over time and disappear on it's own), she was an entirely different person on the inside. The crazy route that the past few days had led led on had left her markedly changed. Would she be able to fit back into the hole that she had left behind?

"Candace?" Phineas asked, waving his hand in front of her face. She abruptly snapped back to reality.

"What?"

"Did you hear me?"

"No, what'd you say?"

He gestured back to the open dimensional portal behind them.

"We're gonna close the portal now. It's your last chance to, I don't know, look at it or something."

Candace smiled to herself.

"That's fine. You can go ahead and close it."

Ferb picked up a rock from the ground and hefted it up and down in his hand. He paused for a moment, and then with perfect aim, chucked through the portal, where banged into a button on the side of the dimensional rifter. A red light on the machine flashed on.

"Self destruct activated," a robotic female voice said. "3...2...1...Self destruuuuuuuuccccc..."

Sparks flew from the device, and smoke began pouring from the top. The portal flickered, and began shrinking. Then, like a faulty light bulb, it went out. The light that had been pouring through it was gone, and the darkness of the night settled down on the yard.

"Well," Phineas said, "That should about do it. Come on, guys, let's go inside."

They walked the short distance to the sliding glass door that opened from the house into the back yard.

"Hmm." Phineas tested the door. "It's locked. Well, that sucks. I left my key in my other pants. Ferb? Candace?"

Candace patted her pockets, but no key could be found. She turned to Ferb, but saw him shrug.

"Is that spare key still under the loose concrete piece in the middle of the driveway?" Phineas asked.

She grimaced. "Uh," she replied, "It is - but I don't think we can get to it anymore."

Phineas frowned. "Why's that?"

"I launched a rocket from the middle of the driveway, and covered the scorched spot it made with paint. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I covered it up." She smiled sheepishly.

But Phineas shook his head with a smile.

"When was that?" he asked.

"Like two days...oh." Even as she said it, the realization dawned on her. They'd returned to Friday - two days _before_ the rocket had even been built.

"Now you're thinking with quantum continuity paradoxes!" Phineas said. "Let's go get that key."

The driveway in front of the house was untouched, as expected. The flow of time and the sequence of events that Candace remembered from the previous time she'd lived through these days would be drastically upset. In fact, the only reason that she didn't run into a past version of herself was because of her short stay in the non-dimension, which had temporarily erased her existence.

Locating the loose chunk of concrete, Ferb picked it up and took the extra house key from the small space beneath it. She waited patiently as he unlocked the front door, and returned the key to its hiding place.

Quietly creeping inside the house, Candace deeply inhaled the familiar scent of the old carpet and well-used furniture. All the lights in the house were off, and only the subtle humming of the refrigerator in the other room could be heard.

"Let's go downstairs into the basement," Phineas whispered. "And we can play a game or something, while we wait for Mom and Dad to wake up."

A smile crept over her face, though it was almost imperceptible in the darkness of the living room.

"We can play Skiddley Whiffers ... if you wanna get _destroyed_."

"I guess I'll have to take you up on that then," Phineas replied. "Come on guys. And _shh_."

As Candace followed Phineas through the house, something outside the large living room made her stop and double take. For a briefest of moments, she could have sworn that she'd seen a flash of bright orange and red underneath one of the streetlights on the road. She blinked, and it was gone.

Once down the basement, Phineas dropped the muted tone of voice, and flipped on the switch, temporarily blinding her in a bath of electric light.

"Oh, there you are Perry!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing in the basement?" He rushed forwards and picked up the platypus, hugging him tightly. "Did you miss us?" He scratched the platypus' head.

"You think he knows that we traveled beyond reality, and to another dimension?" Candace asked, now that her eyes were adjusted to the light.

Phineas smiled. "I'm sure that he would if he could. Of course, we _have_ returned to a point in time before we left, so I guess from his point of view, we were never even gone." He held the animal up to her. She made an exaggerated scowling face, but still reached out and gave the animal a short rub on the back of the head.

Ferb also his took his turn to hug the family pet.

"What are you doing awake this early?" Phineas asked Perry. "Hmm? Have you been pooping down here instead in the litter box again?" He took a long whiff of the basement air. "I don't smell anything. Have you been a good boy, hm? Of course you have." He smiled and set the animal down on the ground. Once down, Perry promptly ran up the basement stairs, disappearing from view.

"Where's he going?" Candace asked. Phineas shrugged.

"Back to bed, I guess?"

Ferb reached up to the wooden shelf and pulled down the well-worn Skiddley Whiffers game box. Candace smiled.

"So we're doing this then? I'm the _absolute_ best at this game."

"Even the giant version." Phineas pointed out.

"You know it!"

Ferb removed the lid and set it aside, dumping out the pieces and die and board onto the floor.

"I get the sneaker!" she said, snatching up the piece from the pile.

"I'll take the fedora," Phineas said, "And Ferb picks the ... hair dryer, I guess."

Candace sat cross-legged on the floor, and helped set up the various little plastic bits and pieces that sat on the board. They rolled the dice to determine the order of play, and began the game. The large analog clock hanging on the basement wall was the only indication of the passage of time, and it was completely ignored as the three of them were caught up in the spirit of friendly competition. Four o'clock became five, and five o'clock became six, and six o'clock became seven. Outside, the sun began peeking over the horizon, and the stars faded out as the sky was painted with broad strokes of red, pink, and orange.

Deep into the third game, and almost ready to roll the dice on a crucial turn that could make or break her winning streak, they were interrupted by footsteps on the basement stairs. All eyes turned, as Linda Flynn-Fletcher appeared at the foot of the stairs.

"Well, good morning, everyone!" she smiled at her children. "I see you're all pretty busy. Having fun, huh?" Phineas and Ferb sprang up from their places on the floor next to the game board, and rushed towards her.

"What's this all about?" Linda chuckled, returning their warm embraces.

"It's nothing," Phineas said after a moment. "We just love you. It's - it's like we haven't seen you in days."

She smiled. "Well, thank you. I love you too - though I am pretty sure I saw you just yesterday." She looked up at Candace. "Are you too big to want to join in?" she asked, reaching out one hand.

Candace rolled her eyes, but still stood up and stepped towards them, joining in the group hug. The warmth of her family was creeping back into her heart. They were all together again.

"You know," her mother said after a moment, "I swear I'm losing my mind, but I can't quite lay my finger on where you got that broken arm. It's all kind of fuzzy, like I can almost remember, but not quite." The four of them broke apart and stepped back.

Phineas smiled. "It's probably due to space-time's innate dimensional membrane repairs. Memories are sometimes negatively affected by shifting timelines, thanks to the brain's complex neuro-chemical structure."

Linda laughed for a moment. "Oh, my. I remember I was a kid. You two treasure these days. Imagination like that is a wonderful thing."

"I suppose that's true...?" Phineas replied, with a questioning tone of voice.

"Well, your father will be done with breakfast soon, so we should probably go up and eat, huh? Does that sound alright?"

Phineas and Ferb's eyes lit up and they raced up the stairs. Linda turned to follow them, but stopped when she realized Candace had not moved.

"Is something wrong, honey?" she asked. Candace shook her head.

"It's nothing. I just, well, it's so good to see you again. I love you, Mom." She stepped forwards and threw her arm around her mother. The strange feeling of flatness and falseness that had been hanging over everyone around her was gone. Here was the mother she had missed - the mother she loved. Huge chunks of the barriers she'd built up were being washed away. It was almost to much to handle, but she took a deep breath and calmed herself. Linda returned the hug, unable to fully know what depth of emotion her daughter was feeling, yet somehow aware of a part of it, thanks to a finely-tuned sense of intuition that only parents can truly understand.

"My, isn't everyone acting strange this morning. You'd think that I've been gone on a week long trip away from home or something." Candace stood back and started up the stairs.

"Or maybe it's us that have," she said, smiling.

"What's that?"

"Oh, nothing. More of that wonderful _imagination_ you were talking about."

Linda hesitated one more moment before following her daughter up the steps. Her children never ceased to amaze her. Sometimes that wasn't such a good thing - but it was the moments like these that made it all worth it, the moments like these that she wanted to savor for the rest of her life.

Meanwhile, Candace rapidly mounted the basement stairs and turned into the kitchen. The smell of syrup was hanging thickly in the air, and her mouth began watering at the thought of the food. The clock told her it was breakfast time, although really she was more in the mood for lunch. It didn't matter - the stomach knows no time, and it's the stomach that always gets the final say. She rounded the corner into the kitchen, where her brothers were already helping themselves to heaping plates of pancakes smothered in syrup.

"Good morning, Candace." her father greeted. "I made ... " his voice trailed away, and he studied her up and down for a moment.

"Is something wrong?" she asked. He shook his head.

"No, I'm just being silly. Come on, I'll help you get your plate." Probably more of that memory disassociation thing Phineas was talking about, she thought.

"Thanks. I love you, Dad."

"And I you - more than you can know."

From the table, Phineas spoke up. "These are awesome! I think they're better than your rocket cakes, Ferb, no offense."

Her dad raised his eyebrows. "Had rocket cakes, did you? What'd they taste like? Rocket or cake?" Phineas laughed, but went back to eating without answering. Lawrence poured out the syrup onto Candace's plate, and handed it her.

"Here you go. Let me know if you need anything else."

"Thanks, dad."

She carried the plate over to the table and sat down in her usual seat. A few moments during which only the sound of eating could be heard, but then Phineas piped up again.

"So, what do you guys want to do today?"

Candace was more surprised by the statement than she had any reasonable right to be. Why would Phineas, of all people, care that they'd already lived half a day before starting this one?

Linda strolled through the kitchen, arms full of laundry.

"Already getting busy?" she asked. "Don't forget school starts Monday - if you need anything else, then these are your last chances to let me know."

"Thanks!" Phineas beamed. "So, any ideas?"

Something very strange was stirring up in Candace's heart. Even though she'd already built plenty of things with her brothers, something about this was ... different. This was what Phineas and Ferb did every day - and he had fielded an open invitation for her to join them. She felt somewhat intimidated, for no good reason at all.

"I - I do." she said, a bit more quietly than she realized. Phineas turned to face her, eagerly awaiting what she had to say.

"Uh, we could build a roller coaster, you know, like the one from the first day of summer and from the musical. I never actually got the chance to ride it." She offered him a smile, but internally smacked herself. Why had she even thought to offer up an already doubly-recycled idea? He'd reject it, of course. His head was probably chock-full of other ideas that were far more creative and original than her re-hashed garbage.

"That's ... awesome! It'll be great - a common thread in the beginning, middle, and end of summer. Ferb, Candace, I know what we're going to do today!" The cloud of self-doubt was instantly scattered away, and now she felt foolish for even having felt that way in the first place.

"Aren't you three a little young to be roller coaster engineers?" Lawrence asked with amusement from his seat at the table.

Candace was going to jump at the chance to say ' _Yes. Yes, we are._ ', but she was just a moment too slow, and Phineas got in ahead of her.

"You would think so, wouldn't you? But, surprisingly enough, if you look close enough at the fine print in the files and forms for this stuff, age usually isn't mentioned at all - meaning technically anyone can do it with the appropriate resources and waivers."

"Ah." Lawrence nodded with a smile on his face. "It's all in the fine print, eh?"

"Always."

"Well, you have fun out there, I guess. Make sure you put your plates in the dishwasher before you go out."

Candace ate the rest of her meal in silence, listening to Phineas talk excitedly about all the things that the roller coaster could be built to do. (Corkscrews around the interstate! Peanut butter! Rubber snakes!) They were so relaxed and open about it. There wasn't a single trace of subtlety or sneakiness in the way he talked of their plans to defy common sense and logic. It truly was a miracle that she had never been able to bust them - if it hadn't been for the Mysterious Force, which haunted her every waking hour, there was surely no way it could have been done.

Now, just a week or two earlier, her mind would have been filled with one thought and one thought only. Busting - and how _this_ time would be the time that she'd win, _this_ time would be the time that she'd finally succeed in revealing to her parents that the cray adventures that Phineas talked about were not just the wild imaginations of a young child. But that urge was gone, completely and entirely. A new one had sprung up to fill the void. She wanted build now, wanted to be the one defying logic, the one who went on adventures, the one who put together the contraptions and devices. And it felt so natural inside of her, as if it had always been there. No, the busting urges were not gone; they'd just been transformed.

Soon enough breakfast was over. The dishes were rinsed of crumbs and sticky syrup residue and placed neatly in the dishwasher. The table was wiped clean, and the chairs were straightened and pushed back in.

"Alright," Linda said, as she picked up her purse. "I'm off to run some errands. I'll see you all this afternoon."

A chorus of goodbyes followed her out door. A handful of minutes later, Lawrence followed suit, grabbing up a box of antiques and heading off to the bus stop to take the short ride to to the store he owned. The house was theirs and the day was young. The only limits were the ones they set for themselves.

"Come on!" Phineas said, "Let's get started. This is gonna be the best first day of fall you ever saw." He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. Tapping on the screen, he raised it to his ear.

"Hey, Brandon. How are ya? It's me again! Can you trace my purchasing history from the first day of summer? I'd like one more of everything I bought then. Yes, the seven minute delivery. Of course I'll pay the extra for it - who do you think I am? Hah, right? Alright, then. Thanks!" He dropped his hand and slid his phone away.

"The fun is about to start! Let's head out."

Candace followed him and Ferb out the sliding glass door into the back yard. Ferb pulled a small, folded piece of paper out his shirt pocket, and unfolded it until it revealed the full blueprint for the city-spanning roller coaster they intended to build.

"Looks good to me," Phineas said after glancing over it. "Candace, you got anything you want to add?" Ferb shifted the blueprint so that she could have a better view.

Once again, she felt strangely frozen, as if she was standing in the shadow of giants. Why was the idea of working with her brothers to create something so double-take worthy all of the sudden? She'd done plenty of it in the non-dimension, and the other dimension as well. It was something about being _here_ maybe, or perhaps being included so willingly in their regular schedule. They were back in reality. They didn't need her help anymore - and yet they had instantly accepted her into their routine without even a moment's hesitation. Something about the whole thing just completely threw her off her mental balance, for reasons that were perhaps beyond her comprehension and perhaps not.

"Uh, uh, no. It's great," she stammered out. She looked around the backyard, trying to find something to change the subject with. "Hey, uh, where's Perry?"

Phineas and Ferb looked up from the print and glanced around the yard, but the platypus was nowhere to be found.

"You know," she started, "One time I saw him downtown in this-" Her sentence was cut off by a loud honking from the driveway. The delivery trucks were here.

"Bring it back here, guys!" Phineas shouted, waving the drivers to unload the supplies in the backyard.

Piles and piles and piles of materials were quickly poured out, collecting in huge stacks in the backyard. Steel beams, concrete powder, electrical wiring, an elephant in a cage, a stack of wooden pallets, a giant floating baby head, a huge box of screws and another one of bolts. There were the empty roller coaster cars, stacked inside each other, waiting to be placed on a track. There was a box of hard hats, which Ferb opened and passed around to the three of them.

Candace's hat was slightly too small for her, but she kept it on despite that fact. She opened up the toolbox sitting on the ground next to her, and pulled out a hammer at random.

"Alright!" Phineas exclaimed. "Let's get this thing in gear!"

Candace opened her mouth to reply, but the wooden gate creaked behind her, and she instead turned to see the new arrivals. It was probably Isabella, or maybe Buford and Baljeet. No - she was wrong. It was none of them.

"Candace?" Stacy asked in a disbelieving tone of voice as she entered the yard. "What are you doing?"

"Hey Stacy! We're building the coolest roller coaster ever! For the third time!" Phineas announced. She looked around at the mountains of supplies piled around.

"Yeah, I can see that. But what is Candace doing? What _are_ you doing?" The question was aimed directly at Candace, but she felt numb, unsure of how to react. Her thoughts fired rapidly. She was perfectly content with Phineas and Ferb, and maybe their nerdy friends, knowing about the newfound urges in her life. But Stacy? And by extension Jeremy, and all the rest of her friends? She'd worried over this exact scenario a few days ago, but had kept putting it off. Well, it was here now, and there was no more opportunity to procrastinate.

How would Stacy react? She was just a normal teenage girl, as Candace had been so little time ago. Would she still want to be friends? Would she still want to be around her at all? Would Stacy react the same way to her that Candace had acted towards her brothers? A huge part of her just wanted to run and hide. But there was no escape. Every eye in the yard was on her, expecting an answer. But she had none to give. It felt as if her tongue was glued onto the roof of her mouth.

"I..." she finally said. Stacy raised her eyebrows, her face covered with confusion. Candace could feel Phineas and Ferb's eyes burning into her back as she cowered before the awful truth. Maybe it would okay to just, you know, sort of avoid the problem? She could build stuff with her brothers at night or something. Every fiber of her being rebelled against the truth. She dropped the hammer in her hand to the grass, its handle drenched cold sweat.

"I'm doing nothing!" she blurted out. "Nothing! Nothing at all." She smiled awkwardly at Stacy, who glanced at her brothers behind her, then back at her.

"And the hard hat is for ... ?" she asked after a second.

Candace reached up and snatched it off, dropping it to the ground.

"What? Ha ha! Why was I wearing that? I don't know. No reason. None at all." She could feel sweat building up on her forehead, and could feel the holes that her brother's eyes had continued to burn straight through her. The silence that persisted the few seconds after that was the most uncomfortable Candace had ever been in her entire life. She had to do something to break the tension, but what? Everyone was watching her, and she didn't know what to do. Of course! Busting. That was a normal thing that she used to do. Turning halfway around she took a breath and tried to articulate some sort of threat.

"You ... you ... you ... guys are so busted. Yes, busted. Right."

The disappointment in her brother's eyes cut like a knife into her heart.

"Okay," Phineas said after a moment. "Should we wait for you to start or...?"

She wanted to start. She wanted to start right now - and wanted it so badly. But her nervousness about what Stacy would think of her was a powerful force acting against it. Stacy's disapproval alone perhaps wouldn't have been enough, but it wasn't just Stacy she was worried about distancing herself from. Jeremy Johnson - her one and only, the only boy she'd ever had any sort of romantic feelings for, was also on her mind. Together, her fear of their rejection worked in concert to hold her back from what she wanted. She could make it up to her brothers, right? Surely they'd understand that she couldn't let her old friends and her boyfriend see this part of her. It would be embarrassing beyond all belief. No, no, no! They could never know.

"So, are we going to the mall then?" Stacy asked from behind her, the tone in her voice clearly indicating that she was tiring of the strange stand-off going in the yard.

"Uh," Candace stammered out. "Uh, uh. Yeah." She rotated on her heel and started walking out of the backyard, unsure of how much longer she'd be able to hold out while still in that place, surrounded by building supplies and populated with her brothers.

"We'll save you a seat!" Phineas called out after her as she left. "If you want to ride it, you know, later."

The parting statement was nearly enough break down her determination and send her running back to them. It twisted like a dagger inside of her, and made her acutely aware of how disappointed they must be. It was their first day in reality too, their first day back in their normal schedule. They'd wanted to include her, and made every effort to accommodate for her broken arm in the process. As she walked away, guilt built up like a ton on bricks on her shoulders.

Stacy put her hand across her shoulders, trying to be friendly, but the gesture only served to make Candace more miserable.

"Come on, you. Let's go have some last minute fun before school starts. Maybe while we're on the bus, you can tell me how you broke your arm. For some reason I can't seem to remember."

Candace nodded mutely, not trusting herself to speak.

"Oh, come on, Candace," Stacy repeated. "You can always bust your brothers later. We're running out of free days to do _this_ kind of stuff."

As they walked away, Candace heard the loud whine of a hydraulic lift starting up, calling out to her go back. Still she resisted, and continued following her friend down the sidewalk away.

_Focus!_ she told herself.

She enjoyed shopping - enjoyed it very much, in fact. It used to be that the only things that could tear her away from it was Jeremy or the urges to bust her brothers. Well, the busting urges had been replaced by a push to join them - which was far worse, in her opinion. Her busting urges may have been slightly over the top at times, and may have gotten somewhat in the way of her day to day life, but they were still a fairly understandable behavior. Right? That was just the way the world worked - and everybody knew it.

This - this was different. How could Candace expect her friends and boyfriend to understand this sudden one-eighty degree shift in her temperament? How could she expect them to be able to relate this? She was already acutely aware of how much stress her busting had repeatedly put on her relationships - almost to the point of ruining them several times. This dramatic shift would spell nothing but bad news. There was only one viable option, really. She had to convince everyone that she was the same as before. It wouldn't be that hard, right? As long she made sure to stick to a regular building schedule, she should be able to keep the worst of the urges under control. Phineas and Ferb might be disappointed, but she couldn't expect them understand this.

"Hello? Candace? Are you there?" Candace was ripped from her spiraling thoughts of worry by Stacy's impatient questioning.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm listening." she said, though she had no idea what had been said. Stacy sighed.

"I had hoped we wouldn't have to deal with this again!" she said. "I thought you decided that our friendship was more important that busting your brothers."

_It's not that anymore!_ Candace wanted to scream, but couldn't.

"I, uh, yeah," she said eventually. Becoming aware that she was walking down the sidewalk alone, she stopped and turned around. Standing a couple of yards behind her, Stacy had her arms crossed and exasperation written on her face.

"What's going on, Candace?" she asked. "You're acting awful strange."

"Wh-what do you mean by that? I'm exactly the same, I swear!"

Stacy rolled her eyes. "What do I mean? Honestly. You've hardly said a word to me - I'm over here trying to keep this conversation alive and you're just staring at the ground like your life depends on it. Is something bothering you?"

"No!" she exclaimed, louder than intended. "No! It's - uh - I just want to bust my brothers, you know? Like I always do. Always." She smiled at Stacy, hoping to convince her to drop the subject. But Stacy had been her friend since third grade - and she'd spent plenty of time with Candace, more than enough to see straight through the bold-faced lies she was being offered.

"It's not that - I can tell," she replied. "When you're in 'busting mode', you go all weird and shaky, and do this really high-pitched laugh thing. And you ramble - a lot. This is different. You can tell me; you know I won't mind whatever it is. Trust me, I've seen more than enough insane things at your house: I don't think there's anything that you could say would be too much."

Candace's internal war waged violently. The offer was so tempting, but no! She had to resist it. Stacy _said_ she could take anything, but she couldn't. This would be too much for her. She'd probably recoil in disgust, maybe call her a nerd, and maybe _not want to be friends anymore_. She might tell everyone at school - she might -

"Candace!? Come on! Is it something to do with Jeremy? Did he say something, or do something, or ... ?"

"No!" Candace spouted. "It's got nothing to do with him. He's perfect! He's ... " her sentence drifted off. He w _as_ perfect.

That was the problem, really. There were tons of girls that would have jumped at the chance to be with him, Candace was sure. Why would he bother putting up with her in this state, when he could have practically anyone else? Sure, he'd put up with her busting, but this was different. This was _so much worse_. He'd said he considered her his girlfriend, and wanted to be her boyfriend, but how easily could mere words be retracted? How easily could he tear the floor out from underneath her feet? Would he do such a thing? Though there was a chance he wouldn't, there was also a chance he would, and it was that chance from which Candace recoiled in such horror.

No, she couldn't let that come to pass. She had get on top of this thing, and get on top of it now. Behind Stacy, she saw a the beginning stages of a long roller coaster track extending from her backyard, growing upwards and outwards with incredible speed.

"You were saying ... ?" Stacy asked.

Candace shook her head violently, trying to clear her thoughts. "Nothing! Nothing! Let's go, let's get out of here."

Stacy squinted at her, obviously still not convinced. "Okay," she eventually relented and resumed walking.

Candace followed close behind her, doing her best to block out everything but what her friend was saying. But try as she might, it was proving remarkably difficult to follow her conversation. She stared at the sidewalk as they walked the short distance to the bus stop from Maple Drive. All around, she could still hear the sounds of construction rapidly underway. Every time she looked up, the roller coaster track would be longer, taller, loopier and cooler looking. So she kept her head down and pressed forwards.

"Uh huh," she said. "Uh huh." From ahead of her, Stacy sighed.

"I can see that you really aren't in the mood to talk, for whatever reason," she said, throwing up her arms into the air. "So I guess I'll just stop trying to keep this conversation alive."

"That's not true..." Candace offered lamely.

"Isn't it?" Stacy replied. "You just said 'uh huh' when I said that I wanted to go hang out at the _cemetery_. I think it's safe to say you've been paying me absolutely no attention."

Candace had no answer to that. Had Stacy really said that? She'd heard no such thing - she'd heard nothing, really. Her mind had unconsciously tuned out in an effort to insulate her from the world. She knew that she was doing a poor job at pretending to be the same person she'd been before, but she was honestly doing her best. An itch popped up on the back of her neck.

_No!_ she screamed mentally. She took a huge deep breath, and willed it away with almost superhuman effort. It disappeared - but she well enough it wouldn't be gone forever. If she wanted to save her friendships, and her romance, then it would be up to her get on top of this. There had to be a way - there had to be.

They arrived at the bus stop just in time to catch the 9:45 AM bus. The sides of the public transit vehicle were already decked out with posters boldly declaring: **The Return of the Coolest Coaster Ever! Lines start at Maple Drive, 10:15 AM sharp!** When her brothers set to work, they set to work with unparalleled speed.

She took a seat next to Stacy, staring disconsolately at the floor. The bus rumbled around her, and pulled away from the bus stop, taking her farther and farther from the place she felt she belonged at that moment. As the bus traveled down the interstate overpass, she looked out the window and saw that the roller coaster track was already there, somehow having been laid faster than the bus could travel. She counted twelve loops around the overpass and wondered briefly if there wasn't room for thirteen?

Stacy saw her looking out at the track.

"I know you want to bust them Candace," she sighed. "Just hold on till this afternoon, alright?" Though her voice did carry a tinge of aggravation, it was all but overruled by resignation. After all, she'd known Candace for years now, and this had been their daily schedule for nearly the entire time. She'd grown used to it, and wouldn't have expected anything different. There was something ... _off_ ... about Candace today, but she couldn't get at what it was, and Candace refused to tell her, much to her dismay.

Candace tore her eyes away from the loops of track and refocused back on the floor of the bus, intently studying a crumpled piece of paper that lay underneath the seats in front of them.

"We can stop by the Mr. Slushy Dawg if you want," Stacy offered. "Jeremy will be there, you know."

The invitation resounded more like a threat in Candace's ears. She couldn't let him see her like this! She'd have to get a better hold on herself first.

"No," she said at last. "No." Even as the statement was out of her mouth, she could feel the shock in Stacy's gaze. It was well warranted, of course. When did she ever give up an opportunity like this? Well, now she was.

"Okay ... are you _sure_ that you're okay?"

Candace was growing irritated at the repeated queries as to her strange behavior. She was already perfectly aware of it, thank you very much! She didn't to be constantly reminded how close she was to basically becoming an outcast to her own friends.

"I said _I'm fine,_ " she replied through gritted teeth. Stacy held up her hands.

"Okay, whatever. I won't bring it up again, I promise. Look, we're here!"

Candace looked back up again, and saw the familiar Googolplex Mall sign marking the entrance of the mall's parking lot. The bus pulled to a halt at the stop just outside. She stood up and followed Stacy out of the bus and into the warm sunshine. The two of them walked silently through the parking lot, up the outdoor stairs, and eventually through the glass doors into the mall. The air conditioned interior was like a wall, far cooler than the outside. Stacy stopped and turned around to face her.

"So, we're here. You have any place you wanna go?" Candace adjusted the sling on her shoulder. Man, that anti-grav device would have been amazing to have right now. Stacy stared at her for a moment.

"Right. Well," she resumed when Candace didn't reply, "I'm gonna go to _Clothes_ , I guess. I still don't know why they picked such a bland name for that store. You can come if you want."

"No, I'll come with you," Candace finally said. Stacy looked at her strangely.

"Okay. Let's go."

Stacy waved her on, and they began the walk through the wide aisles of the mall. The unusual silence continued to persist between them, broken only by the sound of the music playing from the mall's speakers.

_Clothes_ was a strange little store, having some of the most weirdly colored merchandise you'd ever see. But it also tended to have frequent sales, and so was commonly browsed by Candace and her friends in their free time. But today, Candace was no mood for this kind of thing. Where before, her push to bust her brothers would have disrupted her, it had been morphed into a push to join them.

_Just deal with it_. She told herself. Just deal with it for a handful of hours, then she could go. She could claim busting, just as she always did, and run off, and no one would ever be the wiser. How hard could it be? She could catch up with her brothers on the tail end of the adventure, and maybe there would still be time for her to ride the roller coaster after all. After all, she wasn't busting - maybe the Mysterious Force would lighten up a bit.

Candace sat down on one of the waiting chairs in the store, unable to focus on shopping. What point was there in it, really? She did wear the same outfit, like, nine days out of ten. Most people did, honestly. It made clothes shopping that much easier, to be sure. You picked a look you liked, and stuck with it. It was like an unspoken rule of etiquette. If people went through the effort of changing to abnormal clothes, you could be sure they were headed somewhere or doing something very important or formal.

The itch on the back of her head came back to taunt her. It had now been almost eight hours since she had gotten home. Only eight hours, and yet here she was, already mired up in the middle of all the unpleasant things she been worrying about the whole time. Her entire world was ready to fall apart, and she had to keep it together - _by_ keeping it together. Man, those past eight hours seemed far longer. She'd been awake for almost fourteen hours now - the extra six hours from the half-day in the other dimension were no small thing. Already she was beginning to tire, although night was another eight hours away. Time travel-induced jet lag was a very real thing, and it was definitely having some very real effects just then.

"Hey!" she heard a kid shout from the main mall concourse. "Phineas and Ferb's roller coaster is back!" She grimaced. This was not helpful. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. Contrary to Phineas's advice, she'd yet to remove the communications from the future. Most them were from an alternate future, anyway. Candace sighed slightly and slowly went through them, deleting them one by one. She could feel the pressure building up in her brain, but was trying with all her might to ignore it.

"Candace?" she heard Stacy ask. She looked up from her phone. Stacy's face was marked with concern.

"I - Is something - you've got like this eye ... twitch ... thing going on." She gestured up to her face. Candace blinked rapidly several times.

"I'm fine , I swear," she said. She looked down at her phone screen. It was twelve o'clock. Still just barely even the afternoon, yet seemed more like a late evening. Ugh. How much longer would she have to wait? Days never dragged on this long before - before when she was trying so hard bust her brothers, before when she was normal, before, before, before! Why couldn't she just go back to the way she was before!? Sure, the creativity was great and wonderful if you wanted to build something, but it sucked it you just wanted to be _normal_. There had to be a way to get rid of this thing, right? Surely.

At the same time, however, she didn't want to get rid of it. Back in the non-dimension, and in the other dimension, just messing around, building overly complicated solutions to things with her brothers, well, it would be a lie if she said she hadn't enjoyed it. So what then? She couldn't let Jeremy or Stacy or any of her friends see this new thing with her. They would most definitely reject her over it, she reasoned. It was dangerous, it was obnoxious, it was ridiculous and far to advanced for its time. How could anybody see past such a huge thing in a person? Candace knew that her own brothers had plenty of friends, but that was different, she felt. They were young - and their friends were also interested in the projects they built. But at her age? It was ridiculous to think about. She knew firsthand just kind of stress her busting compulsion put on relationships. And this was worse. It was _so much_ worse.

She had to get rid of this part of her, just had to. But, at the same time, she wanted it to be a part - it felt so natural. And perhaps that was what unsettled her the most. Her busting urges had always left her unfulfilled, and had always dragged down her spirits into the hole of failure that she always inevitably dug for herself. When she had built that apartment building, or that teleportation system, it had been so ... satisfying. The feeling was rapturous. To stand back from something that you created with your own hands, and just be able to think "I _made_ that." To ride your own elevator, or materialize in your own teleportation system, or ... ride in your own roller coaster.

"Candace!?" Stacy raised her voice a few notches, startling her out of her thoughts.

"What?!" she answered, a little more snappishly than she thought. Stacy rolled her eyes.

"I _said_ that it's obvious you don't want to be here. I won't keep you any longer. If you want to run off and bust your brothers or whatever, then fine. Go have at it." She sighed, and made Candace feel guilty for the rush of exhilaration she'd felt at being released. She paused for a just a moment, but the guilt was not near enough to overcome the amount that she just wanted out of there. Quicker than the blink of an eye, she shot up from the chair, and out of the store.

She burst open the glass doors in the mall's entrance. The roller coaster track spiraled up and down and all around the mall parking lot, before disappearing into the distance, behind a nearby apartment building. So it wasn't gone yet. She'd missed building it, but hopefully wouldn't miss riding it. It was still only just noon. Usually, her brother's inventions disappeared during the later part of the afternoon, but it could be earlier, depending solely if they ever came in danger of seen by their mother. (Father? Not so much. Candace had never seen the Mysterious Force act on their father. That may have been because she had never tried to bust her brothers to him. During the day, he was at work, usually unable to leave with her.)

The bus wasn't at the stop. Of course it wasn't. Wait - this wasn't so bad. Her phone still held the modifications she'd made in the non-dimension. Not only was it a phone, but it could also function as a universal personal teleportation system.

_See?_ Candace told herself. This was the kind of thing that was awesome. She pulled out her phone and opened up the appropriate program. A few taps on the screen, and purple light swallowed her up. It cleared, and she found herself standing in the empty backyard, just a few feet from the large wooden booth marked **Coaster Line Starts Here**. The coaster train was not in the station, currently. She took a huge breath of relief. Just being so close to the massive contraption eased off the building steam in her brain. As soon as the carts returned, she'd get in, and take it for a whirl. She'd had to ditch Stacy at the mall, but the most important thing was that she not find out about what had replaced Candace's busting. And she hadn't. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad after all. A new schedule, maybe shifting her routine about a bit, and she'd be able to manage just fine. Maybe everything would be alright after all.

She heard the gate creak open behind her. Who was that?

"Hey, Candace. Thought I'd find you here. How you doing?"

Instantly all her previous calm went out the window, replaced anew with fear and worry. She stood paralyzed for a moment, before turning. When she spoke, her voice was high and squeaky, as if she was talking into a helium balloon.

"Hi, Jeremy. I - I - I - I'm good."


	14. Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave

_Run!_ But there was nowhere to run.

_Hide!_ But there was nowhere to hide.

What was the other option? Stand as still as a statue, and hope that the ground would open up and swallow her? Stranger things had happened in her backyard before.

But nothing happened. Silence reigned supreme as Candace stood frozen in the middle of the yard, trapped between the roller coaster track behind her, and Jeremy in front of her. She looked around helplessly for some sort of _something_ which could function as an excuse to escape from his presence. She'd stammered and stumbled and bluffed her way through her short trip to the mall with Stacy, but knew well enough that it had gone disastrously. Although she'd managed to conceal just what exactly was going on with her, she knew that she hadn't done so well concealing the fact that something out of the ordinary was indeed going on. She'd seen the suspicion on Stacy's face, and knew that the more weirdly she acted, the more concerns she would raise, until her bluffing and posturing could no longer hide the truth. Eugh. Everything had been going so perfectly until then.

"I got off work early today," Jeremy said. "I thought maybe we could hang out a little bit this afternoon, before you go off to bust your brothers." He smiled at her.

Candace opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. What could she say? And more importantly, how could she say it? She didn't trust her own voice to remain steady. Jeremy raised one eyebrow.

"Or after." He shrugged. " I can wait a little bit if you want to get it out of your system first."

There. There was her opportunity to escape. All she had to do was say so.

"..."

_Say something_! she told herself.

"Af..."

The look on Jeremy's face went from amused to confused in a matter of seconds.

"Af...ter," she finally spat out. It had taken a superhuman effort to keep her voice at a reasonable pitch.

Jeremy reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.

"It's eleven-oh-one." he said. "I've gotta get some school stuff later this evening. I mean, you could come with me to do that too, if you want, but it'll probably be pretty boring."

Candace nodded, not making a sound.

"So, how does this 'busting' thing even work?" he asked, looking up at the huge roller coaster track. "That seems kind of hard to hide. But you say it all just disappears? That's ... pretty impressive - and kind of mysterious at the same time."

She nodded again, and he seemed rather off put. It was probably her uncharacteristic silence, but for the life of her, Candace wasn't _about_ to try speaking again unless it was absolutely necessary.

"Do you know how tall it is?" Jeremy asked again. He pointed up at the part of the track which traveled straight up. "It kinda disappears up into the clouds there. I didn't even know you could build roller coasters that tall."

Since when was he interested in the things her brothers built? She couldn't reply, couldn't move, couldn't do anything. So she didn't - remaining rooted firmly to the middle of the backyard. Jeremy raised his eyebrows and chuckled.

"Sorry," he apologized, ducking his head. "I'm sure it drives you crazy. I'll just go down the street and visit with Coltrane for a bit. I'm sure he can see the coaster from his house - when it disappears, I'll come back, and we can go to the park for ice cream or something."

He cast a sort of longing glance in her general direction, though Candace couldn't really tell if he was looking at her or the roller coaster behind her. Then he turned, pushing open the wooden gate, and walked away.

Even as he did so, she felt able to move again. Suddenly she gasped for air. How long had she been holding her breath? She took several long deep breaths, slowly calming down again.

"grrrr-rrr-rrrr"

She turned her head at the familiar sound.

"Oh, there you are, Perry," she said, half-sighing. "You're home early. Did your appointment at Vanessa's dad's building downtown get canceled?"

The platypus stared at her stolidly out of one glazed eye.

"Look at me," she muttered. "Talking to a dumb animal. What have I turned into?"

Nevertheless, she walked over to the platypus and plopped herself down on the grass next to him.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this, y'know," she said, shaking her head. "It really wasn't."

She sat silently for a moment, staring up at the roller coaster track reaching up, up, up, into the sky until it disappeared into a low-flying cloud bank.

" _It's like a leisurely ride down-town, except it starts with a three mile drop straight down_ ," she hummed. It was the tune for the roller coaster song from her brother's mid-summer musical. Did the track actually reach a height of three miles? That was higher than some planes flew. There was something about the idea of sitting in a roller coaster cart and looking down on an airliner that made her crack a small smile.

Perry chittered again, and nuzzled into her hand, attempting to crawl up onto her lap. She winced slightly, and was about to shove him off, but something in her prevented it. She gingerly placed her hand on the animal's back instead. He _was_ pretty soft, after all.

"Oh, Perry," she sighed. "What am I gonna do?"

Silence prevailed over the backyard as her question hung in the air.

"I think you already know what you need to do." The voice came out of nowhere, surprising Candace somewhat. But the shock wore off quickly - she knew very well who it was.

"Oh, shut up," she snapped back. "Last time I got advice from _you_ , it was the start of all my problems."

"You know very well that isn't true, Kevin," the voice replied. She looked around the backyard, and spotted the zebra leaning against the tree - her brother's tree - his omnipresent picket sign lying across the grass.

"What do you know?" she retorted. "I could've saved my brothers just fine without your help." It was a lie, and she knew it. There was not even a ghost of a chance that she'd have been able to make do without the creative know-how. She'd been the one who built the space-time ripper in the first place, after all.

"That's not true either, I'm afraid," the zebra replied, his voice still perfectly calm and syrupy smooth.

"Whatever," she scowled. "You're just a figment of my imagination anyway. You don't get to boss me around."

"While not false, that's also not entirely true."

"What do you mean by that?" she turned back to face him.

"Oh, Kevin," he sighed. "I voted for you, you know?"

"Yeah, I know," she interjected. "You say that literally every time I see you."

The zebra didn't answer for a moment.

"What is it?" She was quickly becoming exasperated.

"It gets much stranger, Kevin."

Candace rolled her eyes.

"'It gets much stranger, Kevin'," she mocked in a high-pitched voice. "Tell me, _what_ exactly gets much stranger?"

The zebra turned and looked directly into her eyes.

"Kevin, a part of you that hasn't seen the light of day for a very long time was just woken up. You know good and well that you won't be able to bottle it up again. I know you know this because _I_ know this, and as you so explicitly pointed out, I _am_ a figment of your imagination."

"What?" Candace echoed. "But you said that being my imagination was 'not entirely true'? And whats this about bottling up parts of me?"

The zebra picked up his picket sign and used it to gesture at the roller coaster.

"Buford, shh! You'll wake her up!" he said.

Candace squinted at the zebra, rapidly becoming confused.

"Well, it ain't my fault that she decided to fall asleep in the middle of your yard! What kinda person does that anyway? There's a perfectly good couch right in there!"

Suddenly, her vision shifted, and she was looking up at the sky. She gradually became aware of a circle of faces looking down at her.

"Agh! Phineas!" she started, reaching out with her good arm in an attempt to push herself up off the ground.

"It's okay, Candace," he answered, grabbing ahold of her hand and pulling her up.

"Didja have a nice nap there?" Buford's rough, gravely voice cut in.

"What?" she stammered.

"Lay off, Buford," Isabella protested. "You heard what Phineas said. They've been time traveling! You know how badly jet-lagged time travel can make you feel."

"What?!" Candace exclaimed. Her panicky eyes found her brother's. _You told them?!_ she mentally yelled at him. Some way or another, he instantly deduced her internal questions.

"Don't worry," he said. "I only told the exciting parts - the hovercraft and the second dimension."

"Oh." she replied, suddenly feeling embarrassed. Her brothers may not have spilled any potentially revealing truths, but had she just done so?

"So," Buford spoke up again, "I hear that you've become a nerd too. Can't say I'm surprised, really."

Her eyes found Phineas's again. Though she could hardly blame him for revealing such a thing - especially considering how bad he was at keeping secrets in general - she still rather wished that they had let her choose when to spill the beans on it.

"Buford," Baljeet hissed. "No one here is a nerd. Please, do stop calling every one that."

Buford crossed his arms.

"I call 'em like I see 'em." He shrugged, crossing his arms.

She whipped her head around and glared at him. He glared straight back - and for a moment a tense staring contest waged back and forth. Although he was two years her junior, Buford was by no means unintimidating. Nevertheless, she persisted, at least somewhat confident that he wouldn't escalate the conflict past unspoken - hadn't Phineas said that he had more or less relaxed a little bit in his once-violent ways? At last, Buford broke eye contact.

"Ugh," he snorted with disgust. "I liked you better when you were candberry sauce."

"Oh, lighten up, guys," Phineas broke in, instantly defusing the tense situation with the carefree sound in his voice. Phineas gestured back at the roller coaster track, and she saw that the cars were in the station, waiting patiently for their next riders.

"Well, we finished one loop around, and the track didn't disappear yet. You wanna take a ride?"

The question brought Candace back down to reality.

"What time is it?" she asked, using her arm to steady herself, as she pushed herself up off the ground, and back into a standing position.

Phineas seemed somewhat surprised at the question, but he reached into his pocket and looked at his phone anyway.

"It's one fifty-three."

"What?!" Candace exclaimed. "Two o'clock?! Great. You know this is when Mom usually comes home." She couldn't believe she'd slept that long - she hadn't intended to sleep at all. Time travel _did_ make you feel jet lagged sometimes, especially when you returned to a point before you left. Still, Phineas and Ferb seemed to be functioning basically unhampered by the extra exertion of having a day that was longer than usual by almost six hours.

_Just another way they're re-adjusting better than I am,_ she thought to herself, feeling guilty even as she did so at the latent jealousy in the thought. It wasn't their fault that she was so messed up, anyway.

Phineas put away his phone.

"I mean, she does usually come home around now, I guess. But so what? If you wanna ride the roller coaster, then let's go ahead and ride it!"

Well, she did want to ride the roller coaster. And, as far as she'd seen in the past, even if the roller coaster track disappeared mid-ride to the wiles of the Mysterious Force, nothing bad ever happened because of it - the passengers would all be somehow unscratched by what should have logically been a fiery crash.

"Alright," she answered slowly. She hadn't been able to help with the building of the thing - which was a tremendous disappointment, honestly, but maybe riding it anyway could help with that fact. Plus, Jeremy had said he wouldn't come back until the coaster had disappeared, and there was a chance that if she avoided trying to bust them for it, it wouldn't at all, which would help solve another problem that was looming on the horizon.

"Awesome!" Phineas cheered. "You guys all want to come for a do over?" he asked the rest of his friends.

"Oh, I think I will pass," Baljeet said, "I must be returning home anyway."

"Yeah, same," Buford echoed. "I'll catch up with you nerds tomorrow."

The two of them turned and walked out of the wooden fence gate, leaving the backyard behind. Some sort of animated conversation was going on between them, but it was unintelligible.

"Isabella?" Phineas offered.

Candace smiled despite herself. The look on Isabella's face spoke volumes and volumes to her - though it probably flew completely over her little brother's head.

"I can't," she said. "I'm sorry. My mom wants me home by two-fifteen today, for some last minute school shopping."

"Aw, that's too bad. Well, have fun, anyway," Phineas answered, turning away.

"You know..." Isabella said, "My house is across the street, if, you know, you wanted to - to walk with me?" The look in her eyes was so comical that it almost made Candace laugh. Poor girl was trying just _so_ hard.

"That's real nice of you to invite us over," Phineas replied. "But Candace wants to ride the roller coaster, and I wanna ride it again too. Maybe we can visit some other time. We can bring over Skiddley Whiffers too! Candace is the best at it, but maybe you'll be able to challenge her winning streak."

"No, that's alright," Isabella sighed. "I guess I'll see you tomorrow."

"Okay then." Phineas nodded. She turned and left the backyard.

"Well," he said, turning to her. "Wanna ride?"

Candace nodded.

"Cool."

Ferb stepped over, and lifted up the rope that had been blocking the line for the coaster carts. Since there was no one else in the backyard, they were able to skip right to the end and immediately climb into the front cart.

"Please keep your head, hands, and feet inside the ride," Phineas warned. "It's not a written rule, but it's strongly implied."

The caution was entirely unnecessary. Candace had already had plenty of experience with just how fragile limbs and other body parts could be, and had no intention of pushing her luck anymore.

Ferb reached down under the dash of the cart and pressed a button. The safety bars lowered down, and the seat belts that had been hanging loosely around them tightened snugly across her hips. With a jerk, the cars began moving slowly down the track.

So, uh," Phineas started awkwardly. "I thought you were gonna build the roller coaster with us this morning?"

Candace's eyes widened slightly and she was unsure of how to answer.

"It's alright," he hastened to add. "I mean, if you had fun at the mall, then I guess that's what really counts, right?"

The guilt at so unceremoniously dumping them earlier that morning resurfaced, dragging her mood farther down into the gutter. She had surely disappointed them, and for what? A half hour of misery and making her best friend highly suspicious of her? It hadn't been worth it - not by long shot. She knew her brothers deserved at least some sort of apology, that much was sure.

"Phineas," she began uncertainly. "I..."

But she was cut off by the sound of a car honking. Her heart sank. Ferb reached down and pressed the button on the dash again, bringing the cars to a halt, and releasing the safety restraints.

"I've got an idea!" Phineas said. "I know you've been kind of upset today, but I can fix it! Watch this!"

Uh oh. Candace got the distinct impression that this was not going to be good. Her brothers had nothing but the best of intentions, she knew, but what was that old saying about roads paved with good intentions? Before she could protest, however, he jumped up out of the cart, dropped the few feet to the ground, and took off running around the house.

"Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!" he yelled. She heard the car's engine shut off, and the door open.

"Hey, Phineas," she heard her mother say. "Well, this is a change from routine."

"Yeah! Mom, look! Look what we made in the backyard while you were gone!"

"Phineas - did your sister put you up to this?" Candace ducked her head and flushed red from embarrassment, refusing to look at Ferb, who still sat silently across from her in the coaster cart.

"What? No. Just look! It's a roller coaster! It's s _ooo_ cool, too!"

"Ah. A roller coaster, mm?"

"Yeah! If you'd just look up from the groceries for one second, you'd see it! I mean, it's taller than the house. I'm kinda surprised it's not already in your peripheral vision."

"Alright, I'll come look. But I swear, if there's no roller coaster, well, I guess I can cut _you_ some slack. Give me a second. I think I may have smashed the bread on the way home."

For a brief second, fear shot through her. Would this actually work? It wasn't her doing it this time, after all, and that was what had always seemed to trigger the Mysterious Force in times past.

_Oh, how ironic that would be_ , she thought bitterly.

Irony aside, it was not to be. For even while those thoughts were running through her mind, a tremendous shaking seized upon the roller coaster, and Candace watched in fear as she saw it being ripped forcibly out of the ground, and pulled away into the sky, carts and all.

The part of the track on which the coaster carts where sitting, not designed to bear their weight without the support of the ground, bent downwards heavily, making ominous creaking noises. As the track was lifted farther and farther into the air, (So this is what the Mysterious Force looks like from the inside!, Candace thought), it eventually gave way.

With a loud snapping noise, the front coaster cart broke loose of the rest of the train. For a terrifying moment, the car plunged back to the earth, coming to a sudden, banging halt as it slammed into the grass of the backyard, violently tossing Candace and Ferb back and forth as it came to rest. She looked up as the rest of the train, along with the entirety of the track itself, was continuously pulled up, up, up, and away, disappearing into a cloud bank.

At almost the exact moment that the clouds completely covered the rapidly vanishing hunk of steel and wood, Phineas and Linda rounded the corner of the backyard.

"See ... What? Ferb, where did the roller coaster go?" Phineas asked, seeming shocked.

"Oh," her mother said, seeing Ferb and Candace sitting in the now lone roller coaster car. "It does kind of look like a roller coaster car. I'm sorry for doubting you Phineas. It looks like you built a roller coaster after all." She turned to go into the house.

"Wait, Mom," Phineas protested. "I swear there was a real roller coaster ... I just don't know where it went. It's kind of funny - almost like some kind of sentient force wanted to make sure that you never saw it. That's crazy, of course, but it _was_ quite a coincidence."

"Oh, Phineas," her mother playfully scolded, "You keep _that_ kind of talk up, and I'll start thinking your sister's rubbed off on you." She opened the sliding glass door, and paused. "I'll call you all in for snacks in just a few minutes. I'm gonna put the groceries away first." Then she disappeared into the house.

"Well," Phineas said apologetically, turning back to face her, "Sorry, sis. I did try, but I don't know how she didn't see it. It's pretty funny if you think about it. How could she even drive down the road without seeing it? It was _huge_! And we put posters up all over the city, too."

Candace just stared at him.

"Yeah, awful strange," she said flatly.

He shrugged. "Oh well. Even if she didn't get to see it, we can tell her all about it when we go in for snack time."

"Oh, for sure," Candace replied. _And she totally won't smile and nod and think that it's your imagination when you tell her,_ she mentally added.

"Well, I'm sorry you didn't get to ride it," he said.

"It's alright. It was my fault anyway" she quickly assured him.

Once again, she felt as if she owed them some sort of explanation as to why she'd ditched out on what was basically her idea. She sat quietly for a second, trying to think of how to phrase it, inwardly not wanting to apologize, though she knew it was the right thing to do.

Not one to let silence persist for long, Phineas spoke up again.

"So, what did Stacy say when you told her about all the cool stuff you can do now? I'm sure she thought it was super cool. It is! You know, you could invite her over to help and kinda just hang out. It never hurts to have more people around - the more, the merrier, I always say."

"Oh, yeah," she replied nervously. "I'm sure that she'd _love_ to come hang out with you guys."

"I wouldn't mind one bit," Phineas said. "And I'm sure Ferb wouldn't either. Ferb?"

Ferb affirmed with a nod that he too, would not mind additional companions in the backyard. It was an adorable gesture, really it was. But Candace knew in her heart that her friends wouldn't want to hang out with her _little brothers_. Like, come on. She knew that Stacy had actually done so, on a handful of occasions, but that was different. Those instances were few and far between - and what Phineas was suggesting now was the farthest thing from 'few and far between'. Heck, he'd just up and assumed that she'd told everyone in her life about this new thing. It was a fair assumption, she supposed. It was for sure what he would have done, and she knew down in her heart of hearts that she'd eventually have to find the guts to do it herself, preferably _before_ anyone found out on their own. Still, she wanted to put it off for as long as possible.

And Jeremy? Oh, there was no way. He was _way_ too mature for this kind of thing. And there was no way that she was going to go to her boyfriend and tell him that she'd turned down spending time with him to spend time with her _younger brothers_. That would most definitely be a one-way ticket to rejection - which would, in turn, flush her entire meticulously planned future down the toilet. Not that her meticulous plans for anything seemed to be working out that well for her anyway, lately.

Suddenly, she realized something. The roller coaster track was gone - and Jeremy had promised to return once it did. That meant he was either on his way over now, or would be very soon. A small portion of her panic attack from the morning came crashing back into her mind, and she hastily climbed out of the cart.

"What are you doing?" Phineas asked.

"I, uh," she said, before stopping, realizing that she was trapped between a rock and a hard place. She wanted so badly to be with Jeremy, more importantly, to _enjoy_ being with him, as she always had. But Candace knew well enough that she was no current state to do so. With her mind already made up about not telling him about the inventing urges, she knew there would be no other option but bluffing and dodging about the truth with him, as she had tried to do with Stacy. It _had_ worked then, but it had most definitely not worked well.

And if she turned him away at the door, what would his reaction be? If she had gone over to his house, and he done something of that sort - well, there would have been a catastrophic meltdown. Now, Jeremy was infinitely more mature and well-adjusted than she was, that much she knew. But still, she couldn't bear the thought; purely because she was unsure what his exact reaction would be.

The sliding glass door slid open, and her mother poked her head out.

"I've got pie!" she announced.

"Awesome!" Phineas cheered. "Candace, are you going to come and eat with us?"

"Hmm," Linda said. "Where are all your friends at? Did they have to leave?"

"Yeah," Phineas said. "School shopping and stuff, I think."

"Ah. Well, come on in, guys. Don't let the pie get cold."

Candace silently followed her brothers into the kitchen. She didn't sit, instead watching as they sat and ate their warm apple pie. It did smell somewhat good, but she wasn't hungry.

Alright, she was going to have a lot of unpleasant moments in the near future, so she might as well get one of them out of the way right now. After all the debris had settled, her little brothers might be the only people left she could even relate to anyway, so it wouldn't do for there to be unfinished business hanging between them.

"Phineas, Ferb," she said. They looked up from the pie.

"Hm?"

She took a breath.

"I'm sorry that I ran off on you guys this morning. I really shouldn't have - the roller coaster was my idea, and I wasn't even there to help build it."

Phineas glanced over at Ferb, and something almost tangible passed between the two of them. Then he turned back to her and flashed a smile.

"It's alright. Consider yourself forgiven. The roller coaster was fun to build anyway. It's more disappointing that you didn't get to ride it again. Maybe we can try again some other day."

Candace breathed a huge sigh of relief. She had pretty much expected such a response - her brothers being the last people on earth who could ever hold a grudge - but that hadn't helped the uncomfortableness very much. Nevertheless, it was done now, and she could feel more at ease, at least around Phineas and Ferb. Who knew - if all her worst fears came to pass, then she might be very thankful for their relative closeness in the very near future.

"Thanks, guys," she said. "And don't worry about the roller coaster thing. It's not that big of a deal anyway."

Phineas frowned briefly.

"Well, I guess you've ridden on things that are a lot faster and go a lot higher than the coaster anyway."

She nodded and smiled. That was true, very true.

"Are you sure you don't want any pie?" Phineas offered.

"No," she declined. "Sorry."

Before any more prying questions could be asked, she turned and retreated from the room. It had now been almost ten minutes since the disappearance of the roller coaster. Jeremy would be here any minute, surely, and she had to have on a straight, composed face when he arrived. The urge to create, while not technically fulfilled, had been mostly pacified merely by the sight of the roller coaster, even though she had not been involved in it's construction.

Walking up the stairs and into her room, she sat on the bed and took a deep breath.

"Okay," she said to herself, "How hard can this be?" She paused. The urge _was_ still there, but at this point in time it was extremely weak and easily overruled by her conscious mind. That would change, of course, but hopefully it wouldn't change too quickly.

"I've got this," she said, shifting in place until she was facing the Ducky Momo plush sitting on the head of the bed.

"I'm in no rush to build anything right now, and I'm just gonna go for a walk in park with the boy that I love. This isn't hard." She paused again, listening for the doorbell with a mixture of both fear and nervousness.

"The whole reason I had such a meltdown this morning is because I needed to build - or at least see what my brothers built, which also seems to work somewhat," she told herself.

"But I'm good now. I'm good! I'm good. We're just gonna walk and talk, eat ice cream. Nothing about my brothers or my building will even come up. Why should it? He has no idea about any of it."

The silence of the stuffed animal staring back at her seemed to reproach her.

"I know, I know," she sighed. "I'll have to tell him eventually. But it can't it wait until _later_? I can easily handle this afternoon and evening. The longer he doesn't know, the better it is. For me, for him, for - - - "

The chime of the doorbell echoed throughout the house, cutting into her sentence. She took another breath. The time was here. Why was she worried? She was just going to spend a little time with the boy who was eventually going to be her husband and the father of her future children (even if he didn't know it yet). Everything would be _fine_.

"I've got it!" she yelled, hastily leaving her bedroom behind, and descending the stairs.

She took just one more imperceptible pause with her hand on the doorknob. Why was she so nervous? Everything would be _fine_.

Giving herself no more time to agitate over it, she swung open the door.

"Hey, Candace," Jeremy said. "Well, the roller coaster's gone, and I'm back."

Something about seeing him made the panic begin rising back up like a flood. As long as she kept him in the dark about the building, she'd be perpetually walking on eggshells around him. But that was far better than the alternative. Her smile was frozen on her face as she fought back her internal unease, and she became aware that she had stopped breathing. _Breathe!_ she commanded herself. Her breath caught sharply, and resumed, with a mortifying gasping sound.

"Hi," she said at last. Jeremy smiled.

"Hi, yourself. You ready to go?"

"Yes. Yes, I am." _More enthusiasm_. She told herself. "I meant, 'Yes! Yes, I am!'"

"Alright, then. Let's go." He turned and began walking away. For a moment, Candace remained still in the front doorway of the house. But when he turned back to her, she quickly shut the door behind her and walked out after him.

"So, how have you been?" he asked, as they walked along the sidewalk.

_Okay, Candace. This is just normal small talk. Be normal! As long as you don't arouse suspicion, he has no reason to get suspicious._

"Good," she answered. "Good. Good. Good. Go-"

_Okay, you can shut up now. You don't need to say 'good' a thousand times. He gets the picture._

"I'm glad to hear that," he replied. "You ready for school on Monday?"

"Yes."

_Longer than one word answers, Candace! As long as you keep the conversation on safe subjects, there's no need to be so blunt._

"I can't believe this is already my second-to-last year at high school," he said. "The last two years seem way short for some reason. It's kinda hard to believe that in just two more, I'll be in college."

"Yes."

_You idiot! Keep talking, or you're gonna make him suspicious._

"I mean, yeah, that's... crazy."

Jeremy cast a questioning glance over at her, and she smiled as innocently as possible.

"It is," he continued, leaning back slightly as he walked. "But, you know, whatever. The future is inevitable, I guess."

"Actually, the future - - -"

_No! This is not the time, nor the place, nor the person. What does he care about the conceptual fluidity of space time anyway? This is exactly the stuff I was worried about._

"What about the future?" he asked. Candace smiled at him again.

"The future, it's, uh, it's so bright I gotta wear shades!" He raised his eyebrows.

"I guess so," he agreed uncertainly. "It does look pretty alright from here."

_Okay, that was good. Now, you need to initiate._

"So, uh, do - do you know where you want to go to college?"

Jeremy shrugged. "Not really. I mean, there's a good few options around here. I don't want to go too far away from home, you know?"

Candace nodded. The amount of conscious, focused effort that she was putting into this conversation, into keeping her voice steady, and and her answers reasonable, and her mind on track, was fast becoming incredibly taxing. She looked up at the street signs. They were almost to the little neighborhood park that was their destination. Okay. She could handle this at least that much longer. As the day wore on and on, she was becoming more and more thankful for the short nap she had inadvertently taken in the afternoon, sure that it was the only way she was proving able to hold up under all this stress.

"But let's not talk to much about that stuff. We'll have plenty of time to discuss it later." He smiled. "Did you ever find out what happened to the roller coaster?"

For a moment, Candace froze, sure that her secret had been found out. No, no, no it hadn't. He was just asking where the roller coaster - her brother's roller coaster - had gone. Okay, this was dangerous territory, but she could do it. Just a little bit of discretion was all that was required.

"No," she replied. That wouldn't be good enough. He would surely ask for more information.

Instead, he shrugged.

"Well, I suppose it doesn't really matter. Although it does seem kind of strange that an entire roller coaster can just up and disappear."

"It does seem strange," she echoed, though she was pretty sure that 'strange' was the way the Mysterious Force worked. It made life interesting, at the very least. What would the alternative be? The Mundane Force? Making large construction projects disappear in the most mundane of ways ... she wasn't even sure that there was a mundane way to do it _once_ , much less the hundreds and hundreds of times the Mysterious Force had come into play.

"Candace?" Jeremy asked. "Did you hear me?"

Her eyes widened. No! What had she missed? After all this work, and she had to go and ruin it all thinking about the stupid Mysterious Force! Why?!

"Candace?" he asked again.

"I'm so sorry!" she spurted, her voice peaking up into the higher octaves now that her grasp on it had been slightly loosened in the sudden anxiety attack. "I'm so sorry! What'd you say? I - I swear there's nothing wrong with me, I'm just a bit flustered, yeah, flustered. It's because of - of - of school. Yeah, school! You know -"

"Candace?!" he exclaimed, his tone conveying a strange mixture of confusion and aggravation and amusement that instantly put a stop to the cavalcade of words tumbling from her mouth.

"Relax, Candace," he said, smiling, though still failing to put her at ease. "All I said was 'We're here.'" And he pointed just a handful of feet up the sidewalk, where a small sign was planted that read: **Sycamore Lane Park**.

Candace took a deep breath and laughed nervously.

"So we are., she agreed. "So we are."

Jeremy raised his eyebrows for a second, further heightening her panicky state of mind, but he didn't say anything more. Instead, he gestured in the direction of an ice cream stand that was set up in the middle of the park.

"You want some?" he asked.

"Yes, yes I do - that would be great." she replied, taking a deep breath. Just having something to hang on to, and hold in her hand as they stood together would help immensely. Candace wiped her palm on her skirt, surprising even herself at the sheer amount of clamminess.

The two of them turned into the park, and walked silently across the green grass up to the ice cream stand.

"You want a cone or a bowl?" Jeremy asked, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his wallet.

"Bowl." She answered. That was even better - having a utensil to concentrate on would provide an even better distraction.

"What flavor?"

"Vanilla."

She stood quietly as he walked up to the stand and ordered, then paid. He walked back to her, and handed her the small paper bowl. Her palm was so slick with sweat that it almost slipped from her fingers, before she was able to readjust her grip.

"Thank you," she said, as they walked a few feet to a nearby picnic table and sat on the wooden seat.

"Don't mention it."

"Whoa," she said. "Why'd they give me a fork instead of a spoon? That's so..." the words were out of her mouth before she even had a chance at stopping them. Jeremy raised his eyebrows and lowered his ice cream cone.

"Instead of a _what_?" he asked, sounding confused. Candace's eyes widened.

"Nothing!" she exclaimed. "Nothing! Of course they gave me a fork. I mean, what else do you eat ice cream with?"

He stared at her for a few seconds.

"I don't know," he said slowly. "I thought you said, like, ' _poon_ ' or something."

"' _Poon_ '? What? No. What's that? I don't know. For sure not. At all." She stopped herself from continuing, fully aware that this was not helping her case.

"Candace, are you okay? You seem kind of... jumpy. More than usual, I mean."

Candace's breath caught in her throat. No! This was not how this was supposed to go. She had to get on top of this, and steer it back to safety, before this date ending up turning into another disaster like her encounter with Stacy this morning. That meant, first of all, _not_ overreacting. _Not_ overreacting. _Not_.

_Be calm_. She told herself. _Be calm_.

"I'm - I'm fine. It was just a slip of the tongue. There's nothing even slightly out of the usual going on." she said, in a monotone so flat and even it would have made even a robot proud.

Jeremy stared at her for a few more heart-stopping moments, before eventually going back to his ice cream. Candace's heart pounded in her chest. Was he satisfied? Had she successfully changed the course of the conversation? And why on earth was changing the course of this one conversation so much harder than changing the course of the entire future?

Not wanting to seem ungrateful, she picked up the plastic fork and used it to scoop up a bite of the ice cream in her bowl. It was good, that much even she could admit. She'd have to watch how much she ate, and how quickly, of course, - otherwise her dairy allergy could quickly turn this otherwise pleasant food into a _very_ uncomfortable bathroom experience - but she'd already been doing that her entire life, so it was second nature by now, coming almost without thought.

As she swallowed the mouthful of cream, the pangs of brain freeze set in for a brief moment. As they faded, however, she became aware of another pain in her head - one much more familiar and frightening. It was the same headache that she'd felt that first night after originally grasping the Theory of Everything. It wasn't quite so bad as then, but it still held the frightening possibility to be so. And it entirely freaked Candace out. She was already trying her absolute hardest to project a normalcy, and here she was, presented with an upcoming point in time at which all the willpower in the world would prove unable to keep up her affected air of 'sameness'. She knew how this worked, having fallen victim to it one to many times before. The pain would steadily worsen, until there was no holding back whatever invention was rattling around her brain.

_Why?_ she frantically thought.

Everything had seemed to be under control before she left the house. Phineas and Ferb's roller coaster had kept the urges passive and weak indeed - but it had been Phineas and Ferb's roller coaster in the end. She could cheat around the urges a little bit with other's creativity, but she couldn't run forever. The psychotic break brought on by intense headaches - filled with an unquenchable lust for mechanical engineering - was coming for her, and she felt powerless to stop it.

As all these thoughts ran through her head, the panic that she had been so neatly keeping under control threatened to escape.

"Candace?" she heard Jeremy ask, sounding concerned. "Candace?"

"Y - yes?" she managed to get out, tripping a little over the enunciation of the word.

"Are you okay?" he asked worriedly. "You just got really really pale all of a sudden. Do you need something?"

_Okay. Okay. Don't freak out. Don't freak out. Be calm._

Being calm and not freaking out was not something that came easily to Candace Flynn. But the looming disaster was still just that: looming. All she needed to do was find some way to ditch Jeremy and get away from him. And find a way to do that without putting their relationship at risk. It wouldn't be that hard, surely. She could - she could pretend to be getting a text message from her mother that ordered her home. Yes, that was an excellent idea. She stuck the fork back into the bowl of ice cream and reached into her pocket, as subtly as possible.

Wait a second ... where w _as_ her phone? She never went anywhere without it - never. The box of plastic bags underneath the bathroom sink at home was proof positive that that sometimes included the shower as well. But where was it now? Her fingers curled around the smooth, silvery box that had been given her by the Martians. No, that wasn't it. There was was the crumpled up note whose sender was still a mystery. Aside from those two things and a small piece of lint, her pockets were empty.

Where could it have gone? Had it fallen out onto the grass while she slept in the backyard? No, that was impossible. She'd surely have seen it on the grass if it had - like many of the things she owned, her phone case was bright pink and would have made for a marked contrast with the grass. Had someone taken it? No, that was similarly impossible. Unless someone had snuck into the backyard while she slept, the only other living creature in the yard had been Perry - and what would the lazy animal want with her phone? Come to think of it, Perry _had_ been missing when she had been woken up, but that was hardly out of the ordinary anyway.

Where had she seen it last? She'd used it to teleport from the Googolplex Mall parking lot the backyard, and - and that was the last time she remembered seeing it. Somewhere between that time and now, it had somehow found its way out of her pocket, now leaving her stranded here in the park, with a time of reckoning fast approaching.

"Is everything alright?" Jeremy asked again, his face marked with concern.

"What? Yeah! Everything's fine - fine." she quickly replied.

But everything was _not_ fine. She had to get away from him, and fast, or else their entire relationship would be toast. But how? The late afternoon sun was still hanging low over the horizon, and though she couldn't tell exactly what time it was, she knew that it was too early to say that it 'was getting late'. Without a phone, she couldn't pull a fake text, and with Jeremy sitting directly across the picnic table from her, there was no way she could fake an illness.

Sure, she could just up and run away, or say ' _Sorry, but I have to go_.' But those were the kind of things that aroused suspicion in people, and the last thing she needed was more of that right now. Plus, it would most definitely hurt his feelings, and why would he want to spend time with someone who would do such a thing? Candace felt a flush of guilt run through her veins. He wouldn't - of course. The only reason she was even able to keep him interested _right now_ was her overly-complex web of lies that was rapidly crumbling to dust. Inwardly she cursed herself for losing her phone. She cast her eyes frantically about the park, hunting for some excuse, some way to ditch him without him realizing that he had been ditched.

She might even have been able to play it off as 'busting', but that option to was not a good choice. It was far too late in the afternoon for her brothers to have built anything, and more importantly, they'd already built one thing, and Jeremy had already seen it disappear. And everyone knew that they only built one large project a day.

"Are you sure everything's alright?" he asked for the third time.

Candace could feel her panic spiking to new heights.

"Yes, yes, yes, everything's okay, wonderful - don't you worry about it, I'm just way on edge because school and stuff and , and ..." Her eyes fell on the small row of portable toilets near the park entrance. She glanced down at the paper bowl of ice cream. Of course! Here was a way. It was going to be embarrassing to no end, but if she played it right, would let her get away from him, without hurting their relationship, before she was no longer able to hold back her urges.

"Oh," she stammered. "Oh, no! I ate too much ice cream! I can - my stomach, oh!" She faked a pained expression and put her hand on her stomach. Jeremy frowned.

"You only took one bite, though?" he pointed out.

"I - I - had a bunch at home!" she said quickly.

"I thought the ice cream at your house was lactose-free anyway?"

"Mom bought the wrong kind by mistake!" she moaned, "And I can feel it acting up. Urgh! I've gotta get home - I think I'm going to be sick." To help add an air of authenticity to her complaints, she coughed loudly several times. Her conscience scolded her harshly as she added layer after layer to the tangled web she was weaving.

Jeremy instantly stood up, and offered her his hand, all suspicion replaced with concern.

"Come on," he said, "I'll walk you home." What? No, this wasn't how this was supposed to go!

"N-no!" she stammered. "I'll go by myself. It's - it's too embarrassing."

"Candace," Jeremy said reasonably, "I've known you for how long now? Don't worry about it. I can handle it."

The headache was growing stronger now, which made it at once easier to look in pain and harder to clearly express her thoughts.

"I said no! No! I'm going on my own - I've got to! Please, just let me!"

"Why?" he echoed again. "What's wrong? Are you sure you're okay? I don't think it's a good idea ..."

A spurt of entirely unjustified anger rose up inside of Candace. She should have known he'd have reacted like this. He was so caring and generally concerned about her well-being. Why, though? Why did he have to be so perfect? Was it really worth it for someone like him to be wasted on someone as messed up as she felt?

"NO!" she shouted. "Just - just let me go!" and without any further comments she abruptly stood up from the picnic table, and turned, and ran. The pounding headache was only worsened by the intense guilt and regret she felt for so brashly shoving him away. She wanted to just stop and break down in tears, confident that he would never want to see her again after what she'd just done. But she couldn't stop - the push in her brain had grown too strong for her conscious mind to overrule any longer.

It had now been fifteen hours since she had actually built anything - fifteen hours too long. The temporary dampening effect that her brother's invention had had upon her only served to worsen the pain when at last it could be stayed no longer.

There had to be something around here to build with. There had to be. If there wasn't, well, that wasn't an option. Caught up in the throes of withdrawing, her mind seemed entirely drained of all thoughts except one: Invent! Create! Explore! Discover! _Do the impossible_!

As she ran down the street, her wild eyes laid upon an empty lot. The basic wooden frame of a house had been erected, but the construction crews had packed up and left for the evening. Piles of supplies were stacked neatly here and there, and a box of tools was conveniently sitting open on a stack of lumber. Here. Here was the solution.

Not even the fact that one of her arms was broken could stop her. It couldn't have been a more perfect opportunity. Catching up the toolbox, Candace dumped them out onto the ground. Then she set to work - her speed and efficiency only ever so slightly impacted by the cast. With motions so quick the eye could hardly follow, she finished the wooden frame, adding an extra three stories and an attic. She poured concrete, and stacked bricks, and applied layers of mortar. She dug a roomy basement, and shingled the roof. She ran electricity and running water through the various rooms of the house, and painted the inside and out. Carpet and tiles were laid, windows were installed, a pool was dug, and the staircase was replaced with a functioning elevator. She planted the lawn, and with the various spare materials left over, put together an instant growth ray to immediately bring the grass and trees to full growth.

It all took place in just over an hour - by the time the moon was peeking over the eastern horizon, she was done. The four story mansion stood in stark contrast to the humble suburban homes on either side of it, towering above them.

Candace stood in the driveway of her creation, breathing heavily from her exertion. She felt again the same sense of pride in her work that made it all the more sweet to the eyes of its creator. It wasn't as big or flashy as a roller coaster, perhaps, but it was hers. And besides, the in-home teleportation system she had installed to replace the elevator was pretty nifty.

But the pride was short-lived, soon stifled under a tidal wave of guilt and despair. She'd driven away her friend, and her boyfriend, for this? She felt even worse about it because it really _hadn't even been her choice_. Was she condemned to live out the rest of her life at the mercy of the whims of her subconscious? How come Phineas and Ferb had such easy control over this thing? More importantly, how come she had had such easy control over it in the non-dimension, and in the other dimension, when it had been just her and her brothers?

She feared that she already knew the answer to that question, but cowered away from it regardless.

There was a footstep behind her, and a voice broke the silence of the early night air.

"Now, I'm no architect either, but correct me if I'm wrong: aren't you a little young to be an architect?" The voice instantly multiplied her fear and nervousness by a factor of thousands, at least. It was one straight from her deepest darkest nightmares, dripping in pure spite and hatred, that made the so-called 'evil' scientist look like a friendly neighborhood fellow by comparison.

"N-no," she stammered, "T-there's no mention of age in most legal documents, especially if you read the fine print." That _was_ what Phineas had said, wasn't it?

"Oh, I don't doubt that," came the voice. "But how wrong would I be if I said I don't think you have any of the permits or documentation for your ... house. Or if I said that it looks preeetty dangerous to me."

Candace swallowed, knowing full well she didn't. But what could she say? There was nothing, so she remained quiet.

"You know, my mother _hates_ hooligans and law-breakers. I have a strong feeling that when I show her _this_ , she'll be guaranteed to forbid her son to ever see you again."

Her eyes opened even wider at the obvious threat. As if her relationship with Jeremy wasn't already on the rocks in enough ways...

"Well," it continued. "With you out of the picture for good, it seems like there will only be one person left to take the spot of _favorite girl_. Now, that's just too bad, but what can I say? You should've learned your lesson a _long_ time ago."


	15. The Past Is The Key To The Present

Candace stood frozen, with her back still turned on probably the only person in her life she'd ever really and truly hated. Little Suzy Johnson - an adorable bundle of smiles and happiness on the outside, as little children tend to be - but Candace knew well enough what lay beneath the surface of the little girl's outward demeanor.

There was no other person Candace had ever wanted to strangle the life out of so much, but conveniently for the little girl, that wasn't an option. She could feel the spite-filled gaze burning into her even now - and in that moment determined that she did _not_ want to turn around and let Suzy see her face, which she knew had doubtless gone pale.

_Won't give her the satisfaction_ , she thought grimly. But what good would it do now anyway? The damage had been done.

So she did what she'd always done when faced with a problem. She ran - starting slowly, and picking up speed until her little tormentor was left far behind.

"You can run, Candace!" Suzy called after her. "But I can guarantee that it _won't_ be to my brother!"

She didn't listen, instead putting all her effort into blocking out the threats. She continued running, running, running, until she was entirely spent, and forced to stop, gasping for breath, underneath a streetlight. As she leaned against the pole, the light above flickered twice and came on, brightening up the continuously darkening surroundings.

The walk back home from the site of the lamppost were she'd stopped was short, but Candace was in no mood to get home in time to face her family. Her life was basically over now. Jeremy was pretty much guaranteed to discover the secret she'd worked so hard to hide from him, and with that came hand in the hand the rejection she was sure was to follow. Not to mention that fact that Linda would doubtless find out some way or another - she'd probably hear it from Jeremy's mother.

_How ironic_ , she thought bitterly. _Somebody finally gets busted for an impractically large construction project, and it's_ me _._

She wandered disconsolately up and down the streets of the neighborhood, slowly pacing in a huge circle as the sun at last slid beneath the horizon, and the last bit of evening was transformed into night. As the moon rose high into the sky, she at last turned her feet homeward, and walking up the driveway, was both relieved and disappointed to see that no lights in the house were on.

With a huge sigh, Candace shut the front door, using every last ounce of what little self-control she had left not to slam it. She slumped through the dark hallway into the living room and threw herself down on the couch. The dim light coming in from the street lights outside provided just barely enough illumination to see in the quiet room.

Everyone was apparently already abed and asleep. Why shouldn't they be? As far as her parents were concerned, today had been a perfectly normal day. Phineas and Ferb, well, they had slid right back into their old schedule without even a second's thought. It was as if they had never left. Apparently only she was having trouble fitting back in where she had once fit. Her brothers didn't even seem to register that sixteen hours ago they'd all been stranded in an entirely different plane of existence. Was she crazy for letting it affect it _her_ as much as it was?

_Guess I_ am _crazy after all. Not even my brothers can fix that._

Her shoulders convulsed slightly, but she did not cry, being far too angry to do so. Who was she angry with? Herself, perhaps, for being so stupid? Her brothers, perhaps, for once again easily accomplishing that which she failed so hard to do? Jeremy, perhaps, for being so perfect, and trying so hard to help and accept her, even though she did nothing but continuously push him away? It was all of these, and none of them at the same time.

Her life was over - just over. The wild and crazy adventure she'd been on to save her brothers had left her radically changed, and now that it was over, that change was preventing her from just going back. Candace felt her old jealousy of her brothers rear its ugly head in her heart. They had been able to slot right back in perfectly well, as if nothing at all had happened. Why couldn't she? The answer was obvious, of course. On the inside, they had been unchanged, whereas she had not.

Had it been worth it? Yes. That much she knew without a moment's hesitation. When it had gotten down to the bitter end, she had been willing to sacrifice all that and more, without a single second thought. But the bitter end had passed, and the time of action had blown over. Now she got to spend the rest of her life wallowing in the hole she had dug for herself. Cast out by the people that she had known her entire life, able to turn only to her younger brothers for support and companionship. It was a bleak future that she pictured in her addled mind.

She watched in horror as her dreams swirled down the drain. She had planned to date Jeremy through college until they were old enough to wed, and then get married, then have two children - Xavier and Amanda, a boy and a girl. It was a perfect life, and she'd had it planned out to the very last detail with the greatest of precision. Now what? She'd get to watch - as her brothers grew up, happy and successful, no doubt - and grow old and gray alone, unwanted by anyone outside of her immediate family?

The stairs creaked, and she slowly tilted her head to see who it was that had come to see her lie in her bed of misery. It was Phineas. He walked past her in the darkness, unseeing, and rounded the corner into the kitchen. Light poured from the kitchen door as she heard the refrigerator door open. She listened to the sound of water pouring, then the dishwasher being opened, and something deposited within. The refrigerator door shut, and the light disappeared.

Something in her wanted to speak, to catch his attention, to get at least some form of companionship. But she couldn't bring herself to call out to him. Would he even understand? Phineas and Ferb didn't particularly care what others thought of them or their projects. They had somehow managed to form solid friendships despite that fact, something which still eluded her. Making friends was hard - and maintaining a romantic relationship was harder still, and that was something her brothers knew not a whit about.

Phineas walked silently past her, headed back up the stairs. She listened as they creaked beneath his bare feet. Suddenly, the creaking stopped, and he poked his head back into the living room.

"Candace?" So he had seen her after all. She sighed. She might as well have some company for at least a little while.

"Yeah?" she replied listlessly. Phineas raised his eyebrows and returned to the living room.

"Is something wrong?" He sounded concerned. Candace didn't answer for a moment. Everything was wrong - everything. Half the stuff was things her younger brother wouldn't even begin to understand. Yet, the offer of a listening ear was too tempting to pass up.

"Yeah," she repeated. Phineas reached up and ran his hand through his hair, which was fast becoming unkempt from sleepiness.

"What is it?" he asked. Well, he _had_ asked. She had no one else to talk to anymore anyway.

"Everything," she said. "Just - everything." Phineas's eyebrows went even farther up his forehead, and he sat down on the chair across from the her seat on the couch.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"How do you do it?" she said. "How do you handle the building thing? It's been driving me nuts. It's ruining my life! I can't have a decent relationship because of it. And it's driving me insane!" Phineas shifted in his seat, and shrugged slightly.

"I don't really know what you mean," he replied. "It's not really something I _handle_. It's like, you know, something I enjoy doing." His nonchalant answer left Candace nonplussed.

"I mean I enjoyed it plenty too," she said. "But that's just it! It - it like, _consumes_ me. I can't think about anything else!" A brief look of concern stained Phineas' brow.

"How long has it been since you built something?" he asked. Candace rolled her eyes.

"Like half an hour _now,_ " she sighed. "It's not that. If too much time passes, I get these headaches, and it's - it's not that. It's just that I can't think about anything else! Like, this morning, I was like, an absolute wreck, like, all I could think about was that stupid roller coaster, and...and..." She stopped short of saying _and I think I ruined my relationship with my boyfriend._ Phineas could never understand anything related to romance. Everything even remotely close to such a subject always flew directly over his head.

"Well," Phineas said slowly. "Would I be mistaken in saying that this isn't the first thing that, to use your own words, _consumes_ you?"

For a moment, Candace stared at him. What was he talking about? Even as she thought that, however, the point he was getting at slowly dawned on her. Busting - obviously. Prior to this week it had been one of the few driving forces in her life, and a powerful force it had been. Now that she thought about it, there was a remarkable parallel between the way she'd felt then, and the way she felt now. Busting _had_ made her feel pretty much the same way: flighty, panicky, unable to focus - incessantly obsessed with whatever her brothers were doing, if for a different reason. They both triggered massive adrenaline dumps that gave her almost superhuman speed and strength - to pick up and bodily carry her mother through town, or to erect a full-size apartment sub-complex overnight. And they both left her entirely exhausted afterwards, as was the norm with adrenaline-fueled exertion.

She once again felt a little guilty for having so ruthlessly pursued the always-unreachable goal. Her brothers had never really reacted to her constant striving to get them into trouble, which now struck her as not a little bit strange. They merely took it in stride, mostly ignoring her posturing and blustering as if it wasn't even there. Perhaps they had realized that it seemed Candace was cursed to always fail in such efforts.

Of course, she now knew that just up and stopping was not a possibility for them. Even mind-altering beams had proved unable to restrain the instinct for more than just a temporary period. It was like hunger or thirst: a physical need that was really less of an option and more of a requirement.

"Okay," she relented aloud. "So you're right, I guess." She averted her eyes from Phineas' face in embarrassment and guilt. Was he aware of just how much she had despised his and Ferb's creations and everything they stood for? How they had seemed to be a towering monument to her own insignificance?

"See," Phineas said. "I think that part of it is just because you're _you_."

Candace looked back at him and frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Phineas smiled into the darkness. "What do you mean what do I mean? You're you - my sister. You're practically the most energetic, get-up-and-go person I've ever met. When you really set your mind on doing something, well, I've yet to see anything able to dissuade you. You overcame your fear of spiders, for goodness' sake."

She blushed slightly at the praise. She didn't really consider that spider thing a particularly good example of bravery or whatever her brother was driving at. That had been a life-or-end-of-the-world thing, really, and she'd been all hopped up on fear and adrenaline, and even then she'd very nearly been unable to bring herself to do it.

"What I mean," Phineas clarified, when she didn't respond immediately. "Is that when I watch you do stuff, it's like ... you don't let anything get in your way. If you want to do something, then you just straight up get it done. It's - it's really sort of inspiring, you know? And that's just who you are. I think - I think it's a great thing."

He paused for a moment, and looked down at the floor.

_Inspiring_? She was kind of dumbfounded by his statement. All her life, for as far back as she could clearly remember, her brothers had pretty much been the stars of her family. She loved them both, of course, but that love had always been tempered by jealousy, with a side of a strong feeling of general inadequacy. Well, a lot of that had changed rather markedly over the course of the past week, but there was no denying that it had been generally true for the previous good many years.

"I feel like I'm not really saying this the right way," Phineas said, "I'm not really great at this sort of deep stuff - it's usually Ferb's thing." He laughed under his breath for a moment.

"Look at it like this," he rejoined. "Imagine you want to boil water. Now, if you just put the water in a big pot and turn up the heat, the water may bubble a bit, and even splash a little, but for the most part, it'll boil away quite nicely."

Candace wasn't particularly sure where he was going with this, but said nothing and let him continue.

"But, if you put the water into an enclosed space, like a pot with an airtight lid, it'll still boil - it has to - but it won't be half so nice and neat. There'll be shaking and vibrating, and eventually the force of the steam will build up and something will give - either forcing off the lid or straight-up blowing apart the pot."

Even as he said it, she could feel the understanding of his point slowly breaking through.

"Now, with the building thing," Phineas said. "It's like water being heated. It has to boil - and we have to build. That part isn't an option, really, barring super heating and plasma, of course, but that's got nothing to do with what I'm trying to say. So, you say that you can't focus on anything else, and you want to know how it seems like I can? I think it's basically how we choose to let our water boil."

"So," Candace replied slowly. "What you mean is that you just go with the flow, so to speak?"

"More or less," Phineas answered, smiling. "See, if you try to boil water that's all bottled up, it's gonna boil, but it sure as _anything_ won't be a pleasant experience."

It kind of made sense in Candace's brain now. The entire time since she'd gotten ahold of the inventing urges, she'd been trying to squash them, and keep them out of her mind as long as possible. But, like Phineas said, the water _had_ to boil, and if she kept trying to put a lid on it, it would do nothing but make the boiling that much more violent in the long run. The more she thought about it, the more it sort of clicked together. Phineas and Ferb were so relaxed about their inventing habits, you know? They talked about it when they wanted, and they did it when they wanted, and they probably thought about it when they wanted. In return, they could stop - also when they wanted.

It was marked contrast to her own way of dealing with it. Whenever she wasn't actually in the process of inventing, she never talked of it, and she tried to keep it out her thoughts as much as possible. It was in a wild goose chase for normalcy - a chase that she probably should have given up on long ago. She was a Flynn, for goodness' sake. Her life would _never_ be normal. And yet, was that _such a bad thing_?

But she _couldn't_ just 'go with the flow'. That would mean her old friends finding out about this thing, and the idea of that still entirely frightened her. If it hadn't been for them, she might indeed have just embraced the weirdness of her life long ago. But Stacy, and Jeremy, well, they were normal, and if she wanted any sort of relationship with them, wouldn't she have to be normal, too?

She looked at her brother sitting across from her as he yawned into the darkness. Well, it wouldn't hurt to ask.

"Phineas," she said, hesitating slightly. "I haven't told anyone about this, except you and Ferb. You told your friends, and so you guys are the only ones who even know." The admission seemed surprising to her brother.

"You haven't told _anyone_?" he asked. "Were you planning on doing a big dramatic reveal or something? I didn't mean to spoil it for-"

"No, Phineas," she sighed, cutting him off. "I didn't tell them, because, well, I didn't want them to know." Even as she said it, it seemed stupid and dumb. Would her brother take it as an insult? That she didn't want what had been a huge piece of him for his entire life?

"Why - why not?" he asked. "I don't understand."

She took another sigh - he was so innocent to the idea that people's motives may not always be based on sound logic and reason. But she'd already taken the first step, and so might as well take the whole plunge.

"Because," she said, "Because they're normal. And I - you - we, well, we're not. I'm not. Don't you see? They'll never want anything to do with me if they find out about this. It's not normal! And normal people want normal friends." _And normal boyfriends want normal girlfriends_.

Phineas smiled wanly.

"You think I don't know that it isn't normal?" he asked. "Candace, I've never had a normal day in my life. And you know what? _That's a good thing_. There's plenty of people out there that are perfectly content to be born, grow up, and die knowing nothing but 'normal'. They go their whole lives without traveling beyond their home planet, without challenging the laws of science, without creating something revolutionary with their own hands. And, honestly, I don't know how they can do it."

"I know," Candace answered. "I know. And even before I could build this stuff, my life wasn't _normal_ , per se, but still, it's always been something that I wanted, you know? I don't know, maybe it's stupid."

"It's not stupid," Phineas said. "You want to see something that you've never seen before. How can I blame you? But I think you know pretty well by now the old saying about green grass and fences. Everything has its upsides and downsides. And sure, you and I and Ferb, we may never get to experience true 'normalcy', but look at all the stuff we get to do instead! I mean, we built a roller coaster in our backyard this afternoon, that was three miles tall and as wide as the entire city of Danville. And you know, there was a long line of kids wanting ride it, because they _were_ normal, and they couldn't do it by themselves. And that, I think, is the important part. When normal people need something revolutionary, when they want to push the boundaries of what science and common sense define as possible, they _let other people do it_. People like you and me."

He made a good point. Still, Candace internally resisted. What about her friendships? They were important too - important to her. Phineas stared at her, and she got a weird feeling that he could read her mind for a second.

"Candace," he said after a moment. "You worry too much sometimes. There's no reason that you can't have friends because of this thing. When it comes to friendships, the inventing is neither here nor there - in and of itself, it's not a reason to reject or form a friendship. Sure, it can be the start of friendship, but if it's all there is to the friendship, then you can be sure that that friendship will fall apart eventually. How do you think Ferb and I made our friends? Sure, maybe at first they were drawn over by the sound of a roller coaster or a time machine, but it's something more than that. Isabella, and Buford, Baljeet, we're friends, because we enjoy each other's company and spending time together - despite what Buford likes to say sometimes."

Candace smiled despite herself for a moment.

"I don't know," she said. "My friends - it's different, you know? We're older, and, well, this is a huge change that's coming like right in the middle of everything - not something that's always been a part of me."

Phineas shook his head and smiled.

"Candace, if they're really your friends, they won't care less what you do in your spare time. The same goes for your boyfriend - if he's really in love with you like you say, then he won't mind either. That's not say it won't be an adjustment - I'd be lying if I said that, but in the end, it won't matter."

"Since when do _you_ know about boyfriend relationships?" Candace asked.

Phineas raised his eyebrows. "Where does everyone get this idea that I'm completely clueless about romance? I'm really not, I swear. In fact, if I was to ever meet someone who was interested in me in that way, I don't think I'd have any particular qualms about starting one of my own. I mean - once I helped make an awesome romantic dinner for Baljeet and his friend Mishti, and you've gotta remember when we recreated it for you." He shrugged, and Candace smiled broadly into the darkness.

"I have no idea _where_ that idea comes from," she said at last, remembering Phineas's idea of a 'romantic' dinner.

"Who knows," Phineas replied. "But, like I said, it's not that big a deal. I've got plenty of life ahead of me, and with friends like Isabella, Buford, and Baljeet, and siblings like you Ferb, and Mom and Dad, I'm plenty confident that everything will work out. And if it doesn't - well, that's when you _make_ it work out."

"I guess so," said Candace, leaning back into the couch. "I guess so."

All the stuff he'd been saying made sense, really, but that didn't make it any easier to accept for her. What was with good advice always being so uncomfortable to follow through with? It was perfectly logical the way Phineas had explained it, but she still didn't know. Sure, friends are _supposed_ to look past your character flaws, but would they really do it? And would they do it whole-heartedly, and not in that way where they smile and nod to your face, and then talk about you the moment your back is turned?

She supposed that the building urges weren't really character _flaws_ , per se, but was the difference really that great? Well, kind of. The only real similarity was the fact that it was something that would probably be annoying to her friends, just like it had been annoying to her when her brothers did it.

Candace thought about the often pretty strained relationship she'd had with her brothers over the past years. It was normal for siblings to get mad at each other, even to the point of hating each other's guts and seething rage, she knew, but at the same time she was aware of the fact that time after time, she'd taken it too far. Even before she'd grasped the creative ability, how much easier would her life have been if she'd stopped herself from flying into a blind rage every time she saw one of her brothers inventions?

It was quite strange, actually. Thinking back on it, there hadn't really been a whole lot of choice in the matter. Her busting compulsion had been very nearly as strong as her new building compulsion was now, to the point were will power and self control can only do so much to temper it.

Suddenly, a new thought occurred to Candace. Phineas's strange 'slip of the tongue' back in the non-dimension hospital, and how she'd decided to put off pressing him any farther on the subject until they were home. Well, they were home now, and Phineas seemed like he was pretty much at ease. There wouldn't be a better time than the present.

"Phineas," she said. Her brother looked up at her. "Phineas, back in the non-dimension, do you remember what you said? You said 'I'm so glad you've gotten it again'. Are you sure there's not anymore to that?"

Phineas' gaze at her was instantly redirected to the floor.

"What do you mean?" he hesitatingly asked, reaching up and scratching behind his ear. Something about the actions confirmed to Candace that this was indeed a case of more than meets the eye.

"Come on, Phineas," she said. "I just spilled my guts out to you - about a lot of really uncomfortable subjects. Can't you return the favor?"

He hesitated for just a moment longer, before looking back up at her.

"Alright," he said. "Alright."

Hearing him admit that there had actually been a deeper meaning behind his words piqued her interest, and she pulled herself up into a more upright position. The dim light of the streetlights leaking in from outside cast a dull glow on her brother's face as he took a breath and launched into speech.

"It all started a few months ago," he said. "You remember the day we all went inside your mind?"

How could she not? That had been - well, it had been interesting. The inner landscape of her mind had been a _unique_ place, to say the least. And it's inhabitants - the personification of her most powerful character traits - had been downright terrifying.

"It was before your Id showed up," Phineas continued. "When we were still in your forest of memory, looking for the image of Jeremy's drain unclogger. So, you know that the memory forest contains every little memory in your brain, no matter how trivial or life-changing. The size of the tree is a rough indicator of how influential a particular memory is - or isn't. Important memories - like the rules of the English language, or your own name, or your family relationships have huge trees, that often tower above the scrawny little trees containing fairly unimportant things like the ditty from a television commercial or what color that car was that you saw on your way home from school. The trees grow and shrink dynamically as you use or forget things, and even the biggest trees can disappear in accidents. If you were to travel into an amnesiac's memory forest, for example, you'd find nothing but a bunch of tiny, ankle-height trees: even the most important ones shrunk down to nothing."

Phineas paused and cleared his throat.

"Anyway, while we were all there, and we sort of spread out a little bit, I came across a huge clearing - with room for a huge tree. The weird thing was, there was only one teeny-tiny little tree in the middle. And I remember thinking to myself, 'what on earth could have been such a huge memory, to form such a huge clearing in the forest, and yet get completely forgotten and shrunk down to basically nothing?' Well, right around then, we found the drain unclogger's image, and between that all the craziness of being chased around by your Id, I completely forgot about it until a good while later."

He stopped and looked up at the roof for a minute, obviously thinking hard about something.

"So what was it?" Candace egged him on.

"You know," he replied. "It's really kinda complicated. I don't really think I'd be able to tell it clearly, so maybe I should just show you instead."

"Show me?" she asked, confused but curious. What on earth could have been complex that her brother declined to attempt to explain it?

"Yeah, show you," he repeated. "You have your phone on you?"

"No," she said. "I - it seems to have disappeared on me. You haven't seen it, have you?"

Phineas seemed surprised at the admission. Of course, he had every right to be, she supposed.

"That's alright," he said. "Mine will work just as well."

He hopped up from his seat and pulled out his phone.

"You'll want to stand up," he pointed out. So she complied, pulling herself up off the couch and back onto her feet. Phineas tapped his phone's screen a few times, and grabbed ahold of her hand. Brilliant purple light flashed all around them, briefly filling the living room with light as they were whisked away.

When the light faded, and her vision re-adjusted to the darkness, she saw ... the time machine?

"We're in the museum?" she asked her brother. He dropped his hand from hers and slid away his phone.

"Of course," he answered. "Ferb and I donated a hefty sum last year to the Danville Historical Society, and part of our agreement stipulated that we get unlimited year-round access to the museum. They were happy to oblige, especially when they saw the size of the check. I hear they're gonna put up a whole new wing with it."

"Oh," Candace said. How did she not know these things? Perhaps it should have been obvious: with all the massive amount of materials her brothers consumed everyday for their projects, it made perfect sense that they would have made some sort of connections. Heck, there was probably more money circulating through Danville's local construction suppliers than through all of Wall Street.

"Come on," Phineas said, motioning up to the time machine on the podium. "Let me show you just exactly what I'm talking about."

Strong curiosity immediately overruled her thoughts about her brothers' apparent stranglehold on the local economy. She stepped up onto the podium and climbed up into the time machine.

The battered red cushioning evoked some strong less-than-pleasant memories of the last time she'd been in this seat. She slid over as Phineas climbed in and took up the driver's seat.

"Alright," he said to himself. "Let's see..." He adjusted some dials, and pressed some buttons, then reached over and pulled the machine's large start lever. Brilliant purple light shone all around them, as the machine was whisked away through time.

When the light faded, it was daytime. Candace blinked rapidly to help adjust her eyes to the new brightness. It was also awfully hot - and huge trees were growing all around them. Just ahead of the time machine, a huge pile of rock that somewhat resembled a house was sitting.

On the horizon, a volcano belched and smoked, spewing red-hot lava from it's mouth.

A loud, harsh, somewhat nasally voice shattered her increasingly-confused observations about her surroundings.

" _Cantok-incharka!_ " it shouted, carrying far and wide over the desolate landscape, though the person it belonged to could not be seen.

"Oops," Phineas said from next to her. "I accidentally put in twelve _million_ years in the past instead of just twelve. My bad."

"Oh," she replied. "I was wondering what on earth you wanted to show me here."

Phineas rapidly adjusted the controls of the time machine, and pulled the start lever again. Even as the purple light of temporal travel enveloped them again, Candace thought she caught a glimpse of - was that an ATV? No, it couldn't be. Eleven million years in the past, right?

Then, the scene abruptly changed. She saw the brown-roofed, yellow house on Maple Drive. They were in their backyard again. Early morning sunshine was breaking over the roofs, and a cool breeze rustled through the branches of the single backyard tree.

Whoa. Candace did a double-take at the sight of the tree. It was noticeably smaller than the size of the one in her own time, though she supposed that it only made sense.

"We're here," Phineas announced. "Welcome home - eleven years ago. You're all of three years old. Three-and-a-quarter really, as you are very adamant about pointing out. Mom's not met Dad yet, and so she's still living by herself. I've not been born either - though I will be in just a few short months."

"Okay," she said. "So, what exactly did want to show me?"

Phineas climbed out of the time machine and gestured for her to follow suit. Once she was out of the machine, he waved up to her bedroom window looking out over the backyard.

"Here." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small remote-looking device.

"Local gravitational field distorter," he explained, pressing a button on it. Soft green light emitted from the remote, and Candace could feel herself drifting gently up off the ground. They floated up, up, and up, until they could just see through Candace's own second-story window. The window was open, affording an excellent view of the interior.

The sight of her own room made her smile slightly. Her taste in decorations really hadn't changed all that much over the past eleven years, had it? The walls were the same shade of neon pink, and though the furniture was all smaller, all of her old stuffed animals were there - though they were new, and not falling apart from age.

What made her smile the most was herself. Sitting in the middle of the room, three-year-old Candace Flynn was sitting across from her old Ducky Momo doll, and with an expression on her face that was downright funny on a three year old.

"Ducky Momo," Little Candace said, completely unaware of her audience, "What can I do for Mommy? She says my brother is hurting her tummy." She sat silently, staring with all the seriousness of a toddler at the mute stuffed animal.

"Ah ha! I have an idea." She paused slightly. "Ducky Momo, I know what I wanna to do today." Little Candace stood up and toddled over to her bed, bending down low to reach for something underneath of it. After a moment of struggle, she pulled out a plastic tub.

When she opened it up, Candace could see that it was full of wooden blocks, the kind a toddler might normally play with. As she watched her younger self slowly pull the blocks out one by one and set them on the carpet, she wondered just what her brother had wanted to show her. Had he wanted to show her what her life was like before they had been born? What on earth would that have had to do with anything? Maybe trying to drive home his point that normal life wasn't all it was cracked up to be?

"Just hang on a second," Phineas said, his voice breaking into her thoughts. "It'll all make sense in a moment. I've been here before. Well, technically after, but you know, time travel."

Still confused, but having no reason to distrust her brother, she turned her attention back to her younger self. Little Candace was still pulling blocks out of the tub and stacking them neatly on the floor.

"Hmm," she said after a moment more. "I think that's enough."

Candace watched in curiosity as her toddler self began stacking the little wooden blocks on top of each other. One block, two blocks, three blocks, four ... wait a second. Candace's eyebrows raised up her forehead and her eyes widened.

Wasn't her younger self ever going to stop? The wooden block structure was already taller than she was, and was still growing. It was no ordinary toddler's castle put together out of wooden blocks - no, it was much more than that. The walls towered up to the sloped ceiling of her room, and the entrance was easily wide and tall enough to admit a full-grown person. There were windows, and what appeared to be a slide coming down from the back of the building, that ended on Candace's bed.

How could such a thing stay together? It was entirely made out of little wooden blocks, and Candace had seen no trace of mortar or other adhesive. Yet, the wooden castle stayed together, walls unmoving, even as Little Candace stacked and stacked and stacked. At last, she seemed satisfied.

"This is so cool!" she cheered, tumbling down the slide and out onto the bed. "Mommy will love it!"

She slid off the bed and walked as fast as her little legs could carry out of the room.

Phineas pulled out his phone again, and laid it on top of the gravitation distorter already in his hand. He tapped on the screen a few times, and a small radar dish unfolded from the top of the phone. Suddenly, Candace could hear conversation from inside the house, relayed through the phone's speakers.

"Mommy! Mommy!" she heard, "Come to my room and see what Ducky Momo and I made!" There was a small crackle of feedback, as the make-shift listening device transmitted the sound.

"Mommy's not feeling well right now, Candy," she heard her mother's voice say. "Your baby brother isn't sitting very quietly right now."

"But, Mooommmmyyy ... pleeeeeeeaaasse? Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease?"

"Alright, honey," she heard her mother sigh. "I'll come. Just give me ... a second."

There was a slight grunting noise, and the sound of a bed creaking. In a lower voice, the speaker picked up her mother muttering. "And the doctors said the first pregnancy is always the worst. Phew. I swear this kid is covered in spikes. Like giving birth to a porcupine."

Phineas disabled the listening device as her younger self and her mother climbed up the stairs.

"Come on, come on!" Little Candace cheered, running back and forth between the top of the stairs and her bedroom door.

"I'm coming, Candy. I'm coming." said her mother as she slowly climbed up the stairs.

The entire scene had been mind-blowing to Candace, almost to the point of disbelieving it. She had once been capable of amazing things, the same amazing things that her brothers had always done, but that she had been locked out of until just recently? But - that was impossible. It had to be: how come there was nothing in the family photos or scrapbooks that indicated such a thing? More importantly, how come she remembered nothing of it? Okay, it was fair enough to assume that she simply wouldn't remember a random incident from when she was three years old, but why had she stopped? What happened?

It was then that Candace's confused thoughts were rudely interrupted, and at least one of her questions was answered.

Even as they were hovering there outside of the window, listening to Candace's past self try to motivate her mother to come quicker, a strange sound could be heard from up in the sky. Candace looked up, just in time to see a yellow-green and pulsating stream of light pierce from the clouds. It flew directly towards them, and she recoiled back from it, but Phineas remained unmoved, as though he already knew where it was going to hit. She watched in horror as it streaked through the air, directly through Candace's open window, and struck the wooden block castle so recently erected. Yellow-green sparks flew this way and that, and with a _poof_ , it was gone. Just gone.

_It was the Mysterious Force_.

Of course it was. The Force had been a plague to Candace ever since she could remember, and apparently before that.

Inside the house, Little Candace and Past Linda finally rounded the corner and looked into the room. It was empty, of course, of anything even slightly out of the ordinary.

Little Candace's eyes widened upon seeing the room.

"Ah," her mother said breathlessly, leaning on the door frame for support. "I see. You've made ... what did you make again?"

"I made a castle! It was just for you, Mommy! And maybe me, and Ducky Momo, too. It had a slide and loads of room to sit down and a place we could fill with water to make a pool! But - but - it's gone!"

"It's okay, honey," her mother said calmly, soothing the teary-voiced girl. "I'm sure it was great. I'm sure it was the best castle ever." She bent down slightly and pulled the little girl into a hug, and slowly walked her out of the room and back down the stairs.

But there was a look in her eyes - a look Candace knew very well, a look that smote her to the heart. It was the same look her mother had had in her eyes back in the present, when Phineas had tried to tell her about the roller coaster he'd built. It was a look that smiled and said: _The imagination of a small child is a wonderful thing_.

And sometimes that look had been the only thing saving her brothers from being found out by their mother even in a situation where it seemed otherwise inevitable.

"But - but - but how can this be?" Candace stammered to her brother once her and her mother's past selves were out of earshot. "I mean, it just doesn't make sense. If I could do this stuff in the past, why'd I stop? And _how_ did I stop? I thought that refusing to build makes you withdraw - I know that it does, it's happened to me. So, how, then?"

Phineas smiled slightly. "I thought all the same things," he said. "And just like I did, you'll soon know the answers to ... most of them."

"Most?" she echoed.

"Yeah, most," he replied. "There's some things I still haven't figured out - things that really only you _can_ know. The reasons behind your actions, whatnot. Time travel can only do so much, and when it comes down to it."

Candace stared at him blankly.

"Okay," she finally said. So far, this trip through time had opened up more questions than answers anyway, so she might as well just let her brother lead on.

Phineas pressed a button the gravity distorter, and they gently lowered to the ground again.

"Come on," he said, motioning to the time machine.

She quickly covered the short distance to the machine, and climbed in. Phineas fiddled with the controls for a few moments, then pulled the start lever, sending them hurtling through time once again.

As the purple light cleared, Candace looked around, trying to ascertain their surroundings.

They still near their house, but instead of being _in_ the backyard, they were outside of it, just beyond the fence. The single tree was taller, but not quite as tall it would be in the present time.

"When is this?" she asked.

"Welcome to nine years ago," Phineas replied. "You're six now. I'm three - and Mom's dating this really nice guy that she really likes. She doesn't really know if it will ever work out though. I mean - the guy has a little boy of his own, and she's worried that we might not want another brother." Phineas smiled.

"But we all know how _that_ ended up," he said. "Let's get out and take a closer look at what we don't know. Be more careful about being quiet - your past self will be much more alert this time. Don't want to set off a paradox."

He raised a finger to his lips and gave the 'shh' gesture, then climbed out of the time machine. She followed suit, and they crept up to the backyard fence, crouching low and peeking through the spaces in between the slats. In the middle of the backyard stood Past Candace, though she was older now. The familiar Ducky Momo stuffed animal that Candace had clung to her entire childhood was also there - though he was sitting on the grass, mostly being ignored by Past Candace.

Past Candace reached into her pocket and pulled out an old flip phone. It seemed huge to Candace - especially compared to the little girl holding it.

Past Candace dialed a number into the large phone and held it up to her ear. She also pulled out a small black box and held it up to her mouth.

"Hello?" she said, the box making her voice come out all distorted and deep-sounding. It was a voice changer, but not a very good one.

"Yes, hello," Past Candace said into the phone. "This is Kevin Baker, and I'm calling to verify several large purchases I recently made." There was a pause, presumably as the party on the other end of the line said something.

"Can you look up account number oh-six-seven-eight-three-two?"

Past Candace lowered the phone and punched in more numbers, then raised it back to her ear.

"Back in the day, most of the stores around Danville didn't have a seven-minute delivery option," Phineas whispered to Candace. "A lot of the time you'd have order stuff like several days before you wanted to use it. Crazy, right?"

Candace nodded, but said nothing, intently listening to her past self's phone conversation.

"Yes," Past Candace said into the phone. "I did order that. It should be arriving today, no?"

There was another pause.

"Okay, that sounds excellent. I'll be expecting it then. As usual, I'm not going to be there to verify the delivery, but you can be sure that I'll have someone there."

Past Candace lowered the phone and flipped it shut, sliding it and the voice modulator back into her pockets.

"Well," she announced to the empty backyard. "Today is the day! Today I'm gonna be the first person to ever set foot on the Red Planet."

The sliding glass door on the back of the house opened, and their mother poked her head out.

"Candace," she said, "Watch your baby brother for me, while I clean out the basement. Okay?"

"Ugh, Moom," Past Candace protested. "I can't! I'm gonna go to _Mars_ today."

Linda smiled at her daughter.

"Oh, are you?" she asked. "Well, why don't you take Phineas along then?" She turned into the house. "Phineas!" Past Candace pouted at the response.

"Yes, Mommy?" a high-pitched voice came.

"I want to you to go outside and play with your sister. Mommy has some work to do, and she needs somebody to watch you."

"Okay, Mommy." Past Phineas toddled out of the sliding glass door and onto the grass of the backyard. "Hiiiii, Candish. Do you want to play?"

The pout on Past Candace's face lifted somewhat.

"That's not my name, Phineas," she said. "It's _Candace_. Hiss, like a snake. Not -ish. I'm not a fish."

"Okay!" Phineas cheered. "What do you want to play?"

Past Candace rolled her eyes in a manner that could be described as _loudly_ , though she smiled while doing so.

"I'm gonna make a rocket and go to Mars. I've always wanted to go there! It's red, just like my shirts."

"Can I help?" Past Phineas asked.

"Not unless you know advanced rocket science," Past Candace replied.

There was a pause in the backyard.

"Oh, I  _do_ know!" Past Phineas said. "Rocket science! You mean that the maximum change of velocity of the vehicle - with no external forces acting - is equal to the effective exhaust velocity times the natural logarithmic function times the initial total mass - including propellant - over the final total mass without propellant, right?"

Such talk coming out of a three-year old surprised obviously surprised her past self, though Candace herself could easily believe it.

"Wow," Past Candace said "That _is_ rocket science. How do you know that?"

Past Phineas beamed at his sister. "I don't know!" he proclaimed. "But does it mean I can help you?"

Past Candace looked back and forth, eventually relenting. "Okay, but don't ... " her statement was cut off by a loud honking coming from around the house.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. "My parts! They're finally here. It's been a _long_ two weeks waiting for them."

Candace watched as the tractor trailer back up into the yard and dumped out a truckload of supplies. Her past self signed for the delivery, and then returned to the yard.

"Alright!" she said. "It's time to go where no six-year-old has gone before." With an air of nonchalance that could only come from a long-established routine, her past self set to work, quickly turning the pile of parts into an appropriately space-faring craft. When complete, the spacecraft towered over the house and the still-young tree in the backyard. Like pretty much everything else that Candace owned, it was painted bright pink and purple. The entrance to the rocket was standing open, and a large ramp was extending out onto the grass.

Past Candace looked at it, seeming supremely satisfied with herself.

"Can I come with you?" Past Phineas asked his sister.

Past Candace looked down at him. "I guess so. Just try not to mess with the controls. I-"

The loud sound of a helicopter's blades whipping through the air drowned out the rest of Past Candace's sentence. The helicopter was low to the ground - extremely low, in fact, and it had a large black object hanging from it. As it flew over the house, the rocket ship in the yard trembled violently, before being pulled off the ground and sailing through the air, fastening into the giant magnet.

"No!" Past Candace yelled. "What? Why now? My rocket! I wanted to go to Mars! Why-"

The sliding glass door slid open behind them as the helicopter bore the last evidences of the project away over the horizon.

"How's it going out here?" Past Linda asked.

"We made a rocket ship!" Past Phineas excitedly exclaimed. "But it flew away before we could fly on it."

"Is that so?" Past Linda asked with amusement. "Well, I've finished cleaning the basement now. Why don't you come inside for some lunch? Sound good?"

"Yummy!" Past Phineas cheered, immediately forgetting all about the rocket, and turning to go inside.

"Candy?" Past Linda asked.

"I asked you not to call me that, Mom!" Past Candace protested.

"Sorry, I forgot. Do you want to come eat, _Candace_?"

Past Candace turned away sulkily.

"No thanks," she said. "I'm not hungry."

Her mother looked at her strangely, then shook her head and returned inside.

Candace watched quietly as her past self trudged over to the shade of the tree and threw herself down.

"Two weeks of waiting for that stuff to come in the mail." she said aloud to herself, kicking at the grass. "Two weeks! And it gets up and taken away by some random magnet helicopter before I can even use it. Why does this always happen to me, hm? Why?"

Candace felt a tap on her shoulder, and she looked back to see Phineas gesturing back towards the time machine. She didn't want to leave this point in time just yet - but he was right, it was probably about time do so. So, she stealthily rose from her hiding spot and followed him back to the machine. He adjusted the controls again, and in a familiar flash of light, they were on their way to another time.

"This is still nine years ago," Phineas said. "In fact, it's just two days after what we just saw. It kind of the first time you didn't build - but didn't have to, either."

The time machine was now sitting on the sloped roof of the house, looking down on the backyard.

Candace saw Past Phineas again, playing out in the middle of the yard. Her own past self was sitting against the tree, watching him with a unhappy look on her face - obviously upset about something.

Past Phineas suddenly stopped moving.

"Candaceeee," he called out to his sister. "I want to make another rocket ship."

But his sister merely crossed her arms and turned away.

"Every time I try to build anything, it always ends up disappearing before I can even use it," she answered. "I waited forever for those parts. And, same as always, I didn't get a lick of use out of them. If you want to make a rocket ship, then you make your own.

Past Phineas didn't seem fazed in the slightest at his sister's upset voice.

"Okay!" he said instead, seizing on her words. "I'll make my own!"

Candace watched as the three-year-old stood up and toddled over to two tricycles laying in the grass. Past Phineas produced a screwdriver from somewhere (where had he been keeping that?) and with a level of proficiency that should have been far beyond that of a three-year-old, rapidly disassembled the two trikes. Then, once that was complete, he reassembled the pieces of metal and rubber and plastic into what looked like a tiny, toddler sized air plane - all over the course of twenty minutes.

"Look Candace!" Past Phineas crowed. "I made my own. It can't go into space, but it can fly!" To prove his point, he climbed into it and began peddling rapidly. Gears and chains set into motion, and a propeller began spinning rapidly. Sure enough, in just moments it rose slowly into the air, emitting all sorts of strange mechanical noises.

Past Candace was watching her brother too. All kinds of strange emotions crossed over the little girl's face. Suddenly, she shot up.

"Phineas," she announced. "All my life I've been trying to do something like that. And every time I do, it always disappears before I can use it. It's not fair." The girl stamped her foot in a fit of childish rage. "Well it's just no fair. Not fair, I tell you. How come literally the _first_ thing you make you get to ride with no problems? Ugh! It's _not fair_!"

"You can come use this now," Past Phineas offered.

"I don't wanna!" Past Candace exclaimed. "I'm gonna - I'm gonna tell Mom on you!" And she turned and ran up to the sliding glass door, pulling it open and disappearing within.

While she was gone, Candace saw a beam of red light flash out of the sky. It struck the small tricycle-turned helicopter that Past Phineas had built, and somehow instantly rearranged the parts back into a tricycle, which promptly fell to the ground with a thump.

"Whoa," Past Phineas said. "That was mysterious." Then he giggled to himself. "I should start a list and write down whenever I say a word that people don't expect from someone my age. And I could start it with the word 'mysterious'. Oh, that's just a splendiferous idea!" He giggled again. "Two down already. I like the way this is going."

Just then, Past Candace burst out into the backyard, with her mother in tow.

"Look, Mom!" she shouted. "I told you it wasn't fair! Phineas got to use a ..." She stopped mid sentence when she saw that the yard was noticeably free of any flying devices.

"Now Candace," her mother said, half-sternly, and half-amusedly. "I'm pretty sure that your little brother did not build that tricycle. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I bought that just last month from the baby emporium down the street."

Past Candace looked as if she was about to explode. Before Candace could see what happened, however, purple shone brightly around her, as Phineas pulled the time machine's start lever. When the light cleared, they were back in the museum, it what seemed to be Candace's own time.

"Now," Phineas said, "As far as I've been able to tell, what we just saw was like the 'turning point', if you will. It marked the beginning of what seemed to be the building urges changing inside of you - from actually building to instead wanting to show our buildings to Mom. I can't say a hundred percent just why or how that worked out like it did, but it did either way."

Candace nodded mutely, unable to reply. The things she'd just seen of her own past had flown into the face of everything she'd ever thought she'd known about pretty much anything.

Next to her, Phineas let out a huge yawn.

"I'm way too tired to safely operate a time machine," he said. "It's almost midnight now, which makes it a good twenty hours since I've had any sleep. So I'm gonna have speed up this last bit."

"What - what last bit?" Candace stammered. Was there even _more_ shattering revelations about her own past that she should know?

"Basically," Phineas said, "After I saw all of that for the first time, I was just as dumbfounded as you are now. I was especially confused about how you managed to dodge withdrawing from inventing. At first, I hypothesized that it was growing up that sort of drained the urges from you, but after Ferb and I built a rapid-aging device and grew ourselves up for a day, I decided that that couldn't have been it. So, I figured that somehow, in some way that I still don't quite understand, your wanting to show Mom the cool stuff we did was able to replace the wanting to actually do the cool stuff. It seemed a bit flimsy to me at first, but the next day, I convinced Ferb that it just to hot to do anything, and managed to get us both to take a 'lazy day', where we wouldn't build anything. It turned out I was right - I'm sure you remember what happened what happened on that day. It was only a few months ago, after all."

Candace remembered that day very well. Her busting urges had been up in full force, pushing her to impossible lengths to get her brothers in trouble, but that had all ground to a sudden halt when she discovered that they weren't doing _anything_. At first, she'd been overjoyed - there was nothing to bust! She was free for the day. But, for some reason, her busting instincts just _wouldn't_ let the situation go. They drove her progressively further up the wall as the day wore with no sign on creativity from either of her brothers. So, what had she done? The memory gave Candace pause. Well, it made sense now.

She'd built something. She'd ordered something, and put it together, all by herself. There was no choice. With nothing to bust her brothers for, strange feelings had stirred up inside of her, feelings she know understood. They had been the old building urges. And they had driven her to build - even before she understood the Theory of Everything, even before she had actually grasped (or re-grasped) the creative urges.

It was almost too much take. Well, sort of. Candace felt awfully strange about the whole thing. On one hand, it was a huge and dramatic change in what she'd thought she'd known about herself. On the other hand - it had been nine years ago, so far in the past that she remembered nothing of it.

_And the Mysterious Force had been the whole cause of it_. If that stupid Force hadn't been hanging like a storm cloud over her in the past, maybe her younger self wouldn't have gotten so fed up with her inventions disappearing. Maybe she wouldn't have so strongly objected to her little brother being able to match what she did, with one exception. When her little brothers built stuff - they could use it, at least for a little while.

Candace had been her mother's first child. As such, she'd been showered with abundant attention from her mother up until Phineas had been born. And for someone cursed with the Mysterious Force, all that attention had served to constantly make Candace's creations all disappear, all before she could even use them. No wonder she'd been so jealous of her brother on that day and the days after. She'd been trying for at least three years to actually use her creations, and failing every time, but along came her little brother, who was able to build just as well as she, with one key difference: he had no Mysterious Force. So, he was free to use his own creations, without the risk of a spare glance from their mother sending them tumbling away.

Even though it was something she'd done long ago, and as a very little child, Candace still felt guilty for what her past self had done. Had she really been so jealous of her brother's lack of the Force so as to entirely devote her life to using her own curse to curtail her brother's fun? It made her feel horrible, even if it was something she really and honestly had no memory of doing.

"Phineas," she said at last. "Phineas?" she turned and shook her brother.

"Hmm rmm hmm" he started. "Oh, Candace. Sorry. What is it?"

"How come you never told me about this after you found out about it?" she asked, her voice cracking, as her brain, already stretched to its limits with exhaustion and guilt and worry and these newfound revelations, conjured up all kinds of horrible reasons why such a thing might be so.

"Oh," he said, sleepily. "Well, partly because I'd used time travel to discover it and was worried I might accidentally cause a temporal paradox or or something. And partly because I saw you everyday spending all your time trying to get Mom to see what we do, and honestly, it's just so nice of you. Mom always misses seeing our stuff, but you never gave up trying to help her see it anyway. And I saw how much you enjoyed doing it, and I didn't want to accidentally trigger anything bad." He yawned heavily.

"That's not to say that I didn't wish you could join us - I always did. I love spending time with you, and was always looking forwards to a time when your building might resurface again, so we could do more stuff together. When you told me that it had on that first day in the non-dimension, well, it was just about the best day in my life. The circumstances were unfortunate, but the silver lining to that cloud was bigger than the cloud itself, in my opinion."

"Oh." was all she could really say. She'd always wondered just why her brothers never seemed to react to her busting - well, it seemed here was the answer. Did Phineas really and truly think that she did it out of the kindness of her heart, wanting to share the fun with their mother? Did he _really_ think that?

It was just the kind of pure and innocent thing she could see him believing. Did Ferb also see it that way? Surely not. Did he even know about this whole thing? Back in the non-dimension, she'd seen in his face no indication he knew anything of it. Did that - did that mean that Phineas was keeping a secret from him? From _Ferb_? The idea was ludicrous to an almost ridiculous extent.

And yet, in this crazy life that was Candace Flynn's, maybe the fact that something was ludicrous wasn't such a good reason to reject its possibility.

Next to her, Phineas snorted in his sleep and shifted until he was leaning against her shoulder. It _was_ late, wasn't it? She should probably go home, and get to bed herself.

Tomorrow would be a new day in a whole lot of ways - and maybe the sleep would help her clear her head somewhat. Maybe, just maybe, in the clear light of a brand-new day, some of the crazy things in her crazy life would start to make sense. That was all she asked, really.

She'd already just about given up on actual normalcy, but would a little bit of logic to help resolve some of these things be such a hard thing to ask?


	16. The Present Is The Key To The Future

The morning sun fell through the bedroom window, filling the whole room with a warm, golden glow. The edge of the pool of light slowly crept across the floor, and up the side of the bed frame. At last, it crept across Candace's face, warming her skin and brightening behind her closed eyes.

"Mmmm," she grunted, shifting in her sleep and flipping her arm through the air in an ineffectual attempt to wave away the sunlight. She opened one eye just a crack, and looked over at her alarm clock. It was six-fifty five, just a handful of minutes earlier than she usually woke up.

There was a sticky note stuck to the bedside table. With an unwilling groan, she rolled over and pulled it off.

_Candace,_

_I didn't have the heart to wake you, so I'm leaving this note instead. Your father and I are headed to the antiquing convention today, so we will be home around three. Remember school starts Monday, so make doubly sure you have everything you need._

_Love, Mom_

Of course. Even considering all the things that had been changed by the tumultuous upheaval the space-time continuum had undergone, some things were still the same. She remembered this note and this convention from the last time she'd lived this day, before she'd managed to save her brothers. Of course, her mental state had been much ... different at _that_ time.

That train of thought suddenly triggered her memory, and all the events of the night before came rushing back to the forefront of her mind. She sat upright in the bed, and swung her feet over the side.

"Wow," she said aloud. "Just... wow."

What more was there to say?

But the light of the new day, and the previous night's sleep had helped somewhat with the overall lucidity of her thoughts, as she had hoped it might.

"Man," she said slowly. "How could I have been so... selfish?"

The recollection of the childish tantrum that she'd watched herself have over her brother's lack of the Mysterious Force seemed like a poor reason to launch a life solely based around getting her brothers in trouble - even if she knew it wasn't the  _entire_ reason. It was enough of a factor to make her feel terribly guilty, really. If she'd just been a bit more reasonable then, maybe all this struggle could have been avoided. She ever so briefly entertained the thought of trying to change the past. But no - that would doubtless create more problems than it could ever hope to solve.

It was simply the _idea_ , really, that she had originally been like her brothers - and might have grown up being like them - that was overwhelming to her. Candace shut her eyes tight and tried with all her might to pull up some memory from her very young childhood. But try as she might, none would come, except for a few scattered recollections from here and there which where probably more based in stories her mother had told her than her own memory anyway. Nothing at all to do with building or anything of the sort. It made sense - Phineas had said that that mental tree had been completely withered away, meaning it had been entirely forgotten.

Even though she'd seen it with her own eyes last night, it still seemed entirely unreal. She shuddered slightly. Her past self had apparently been able to handle the urges just fine - similar to the way her brothers did now. Something about that idea brought a measure of comfort to the dark places in Candace's mind. She'd known Stacy for almost ten years now. Ten years - that meant that for at least the first two years they'd known each other, Candace had had the creative urges. _And had managed to forge a friendship despite that fact_. And not just any friendship - a 'best' friendship, a friendship that stood the tests of both time and Candace's busting.

Phineas' well-meaning, if crude, metaphor from the previous night played again in her ears.

"The water has to boil, Candace. And it'll be a lot less violent if you just take the lid off and let it."

It made sense, it really did. But something about following through with it still made her stomach knot up. After all, Stacy had doubtless forgotten all about it too, over the years and years that had passed between then and now. Heck - she might have not even known in the first place. And springing the truth on her now would be so sudden, and so diametrically opposed to way Candace had carried herself her whole life. And Jeremy?

A bolt of fear shot through her as she thought of her boyfriend. Chances were, he already knew, at least to some extent. Candace had no doubt that Suzy had acted immediately on last night's events.

_After all I went through at the hands of that ... girl_ , she thought, feeling her emotions taking a turn for worse even as she did so. _After all that, I finally lose. And it's all my fault_.

It was times like last night, and thoughts like this one that made her wish that she could just lose the creative spark. But, then again, it wasn't really and truly the spark's fault anyway. If she'd been able to bring herself to tell Jeremy before the fact, then she wouldn't have had to run away from the park in the first place to satisfy it. But telling Jeremy would involve - well - telling Jeremy. And how would _he_ react to something like that?

Once again, she heard Phineas' advice from last night.

'Ughhhh," she groaned, throwing back her head and collapsing back onto the bed. "What is it with good advice being so hard to follow through with?"

Maybe there wasn't even a point to it anymore. If all of Suzy's threats from last night had rung true, maybe her internal war on this subject was entirely moot anyway. Still, her mother's note had no indication of anything out of the usual. From that, she could draw the conclusion that her parents didn't know anything out of the ordinary - at least not yet.

"Beep! Beep!"

"I know wh-"

Candace cut off the alarm clock almost before it began. It was seven o'clock now. Time to get up and face the day. Time once again to wade back into the midst of all the issues she so badly wished would just go away. Time to open the bedroom door and leave the relative safety of the room behind. Time to definitely not stay in bed. But it was so warm. And there was a such a lack of any immediate problems here. It would be so nice to just stay in bed all day long.

The sound of a tractor-trailer backing into the backyard broke through the relative silence of her bedroom. Drawn out of bed by curiosity, she stepped over to the window and looked out at the supplies being dumped into the yard.

Her brothers and all their friends were there, apparently getting an early start to the day. She watched as Phineas spoke to the group, though his words were inaudible through the closed window.

She shook her head and exhaled forcefully as she watched them.

"Let it boil, Candace," she repeated aloud to herself. She turned until she was facing away from the window. "I - I want to go down there and invent with them."

Even just saying the words was strangely comforting. "I do. And there's nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all."

Well, admitting it to an empty room seemed easy enough. Admitting it to her old friends would probably be another matter, of course, but at least the first step had been taken - and for the moment she was satisfied with that.

She took a deep breath. It was time to go out and face the world. It was in times like these when you really felt that your closest friends were indeed your worst enemies - though she was aware of the fact that most of the blame for that feeling was squarely on her own shoulders.

Swinging open the bedroom door, she stepped out into the hall. Other than herself, the house was empty. Muffled sounds of construction drifted through the walls from the backyard. Walking down the stairs, Candace stopped to look at the pictures hanging on the wall.

There was a decent handful, featuring all of her family members of various ages, but her attention was drawn to her own pictures - the old ones. She reached up and pulled one of the frames down and slid the back off. The back of the photo was signed and dated, by her mother, of course.

_Candace's Sixth Birthday Party - July 11th 2008_

She slid the back of the frame back on and turned it over again, studying the picture. The girl in the photo was incredibly happy to be eating cake, or so it at least appeared. Could it be that when this picture was taken of her, she'd still had the creative spark? Of course it could - it obviously was. Based on what she'd seen on last night's time travels, she'd had it all the way until sometime around eight years old - and probably a few years after that. It often took years and years for major memories to be forgotten, but Candace supposed that seven or eight years could definitely qualify, especially in a situation like hers - in which the memories weren't even being really forgotten, but instead more or less overwritten by conscious effort.

Her focus shifted from herself to the background of the photograph. Phineas was in the photo too, though he was looking way left of the camera, his attention having been captured by something else. There was also another arm and half of a shirt on the edge of the photo, that she was sure had to be Stacy. Her face wasn't in the shot, but the resemblance otherwise was just too strong for it to be anyone else.

As she stood on the foot of the stairs with the photo frame in her hand, she felt someone's watching gaze on her back. Turning around, however, she was greeted only by Perry, the platypus, staring at her with his wall-eyed stare from a perch in the middle of the living room couch.

"Oh, there you are, Perry. Still to early for you to be running off, hmm?"

"grr-rrr-rrr" was the only reply.

"Crazy, isn't it?" she continued, half to the animal and half to herself. Turning the photo so that it was facing Perry, she held it out closer to him. "Crazy to think that that happy, well-adjusted looking little girl grew up into somebody like me." She drew back the frame and carefully put it back in its allotted space on the wall.

"You think she saw talking zebras manufactured out of thin air from her own imagination? Often enough that she no longer thought of it as weird, or even unusual?"

The platypus chittered mindlessly by way of answering, and Candace smirked to herself.

"You think that she ever caught herself having a serious conversation with the family pet, and almost expecting an answer out of it?"

There was no responding noise, and she turned and saw that the platypus's eyes were closed.

"Oh, look at you," she said, half-sighing. "You just get to sleep the day away and do whatever you please, with absolutely no idea of all the nutty stuff going on around you. What a life of leisure you must lead."

_Now you're envying the life of your pet_ , she scolded herself. _Way to go._

But the picture had stirred up an idea inside her brain. In the hall closet she knew there was a stack of old photo albums, which contained the oldest pictures of her family. There would be ones of her too - and there was an off chance that in the background of one of those pictures, there might be traces of her old inventing ability. She wasn't exactly sure what reason she had for wanting to find out if such a thing was true - it was more of a way to keep delaying her leaving the solitude of the house without directly admitting to herself that that was what was indeed happening.

Temporarily forgetting about breakfast, Candace took the few steps back to the hall closet, and opened up the tall, skinny door. The house's large air-conditioning unit vibrated behind the door, warming the inside of the small space. The small shelf underneath the humming motor held the albums. There were three - each one a large, brown, leather book that was slightly fraying along the binding with age. Two of the three were labelled ' _Flynn-Fletcher Family Photos_ '. The last one was instead labelled ' _Flynn Family Photos_ ', and this was the one she was after. Making to sure to get a good grip on the wide book, she slid it out from under the others and carried it into the living room.

Laying the book on her lap, she opened it to the first page. The first picture was of Linda Flynn-Fletcher as a baby - dated many years too far in the past for her interest. Flipping past the first few pages, she at last found the first picture with her in it.

_Candace Gertrude Flynn, two hours old. 7/11/2002_

Wow, that picture was... not particularly appealing. And still a bit too far back. A few more pages were skipped, and she found another.

_Candace's first birthday. How exciting! Sadly, she spent all day projectile vomiting, so no celebration yet. 7/11/2003  
_

Well, that was a pleasant description - there was an equally pleasant photo tacked onto it. At least the next one was halfway decent.

_Candace's first hospital visit. Turns out she's severely allergic to parsnips, and that's where the vomiting came from. Oops! No more parsnip-flavored baby food. 7/12/2003  
_

She shook her head, trying to imagine her mother sitting down and writing these captions. Was it just a rule that all baby pictures and baby picture titles have to be embarrassing? She wouldn't be half-surprised to find a picture labelled, like, "first poop" or something. She took ahold of the pages of the book and in one move turned a huge chunk of them, almost half of the book's worth.

_First day of third grade_. _9/23/2010_

Okay, that was more like it. Now, to see if any of these pictures even had what she was looking for. She skimmed over a few pages' worth of them, stopping briefly to pore over the ones taken against the backdrop of her bedroom or the backyard. As she had sort of suspected, there were no traces of inventing at all. It did make sense, mostly. Her mother had been the one to take the pictures in the first place - and the Mysterious Force would never allow her mother to see anything even remotely relating to the inventions, whether they were hers or her brothers.

_Phineas's fourth birthday._ _Cake everywhere! I don't even want to know how he got it on the ceiling. 7/3/2009  
_

Wow. The caption was definitely no lie. How _did_ it get all over the place like that? It looked almost like someone had planted a stick of dynamite into the batter and just blown it all to smithereens. She could see herself in the background, dripping with purple icing. Everything in sight in the frame was covered - the chairs, the walls, the roof, and Phineas himself. There was even a gob of the purple gunk dripping off the camera lens, obscuring the lower-left side of the frame.

_Candace and her first crush on the school playground. 2/21/2011  
_

Her stomach grumbled as she continued flipping through the pages of the book. Having missed dinner last night, hunger pangs suddenly set in with a frightening vengeance. The thought of her cereal seemed exceedingly tempting right about now. Of course, there were no spoons in the kitchen - or the world, for that matter. There _was_ stuff like toast that could be eaten without the aid of a spoon, but Candace had eaten the same cereal for breakfast for almost her entire life, and didn't feel like breaking her old habit over something stupid like the erasure of all spoons from existence. She turned in her seat on the couch and looked out the living room window. Her brothers were lost inside the mazes of some huge mess of scaffolding and steel support beams for whatever project they were erecting. Perhaps she could use her phone to teleport to them.

No, wait - her phone was still lost. Ugh. Where _was_ that thing? Maybe she should try to find it instead. It really wasn't a huge deal that it was still missing; after all, she'd been losing or breaking phones on an almost monthly basis for a very long time now. It mattered even less than normal now, due to the fact that she could probably put together a brand-new one out of a pile of parts in just a handful of minutes, that would doubtlessly be better in every way than the ones at the store.

Still, her subconscious was enjoying the time alone in the house. The emptiness of the rooms that had once seemed like an unbearable tomb now seemed warm and inviting. The solitude was a welcome change: there was no one to worry about or stress over, a temporary reprieve from the constant barrage of problems she was still smack dab in the middle of. She knew well enough that the reprieve _was_ temporary, but was still determined to enjoy it for as long as it lasted anyway. The creative urges seemed weak at the moment, probably due to the fact that she was alone. Without anyone to worry about hiding them from, her state of mind had considerably relaxed. The water was still boiling - as it would for the rest of her life, apparently - but she had begun the process of taking off the lid. Just a crack at first, but every little bit helped, and the rest would come with time. At least, so she hoped.

Okay, so her phone. Where _was_ it? Shutting the album, she returned it to its spot in the closet, then returned up the stairs, back into her room. There was no way it would be in there, but she might as well be thorough.

It wasn't there, as she had expected. Next, she went down the hall and poked her head into Phineas and Ferb's room. She didn't really expect it to be here either, but looked anyway. There was _one_ phone in there, not hers, but Phineas'.

Stepping into the room, she picked it up from its spot on the desk and pulled it free of the power cable. This had to work, surely. Opening up his contact list, she scrolled down until she found her own number. Pressing the 'dial' button on the screen, she stood still and listened closely. No sound came.

"Hey, Candace. Whatcha' doin'?" came her brother's voice from behind her all of the sudden.

"Nothing," she said on instinct. "Well, not nothing. I was trying to use your phone to call myself to see if I could hear my phone ringing."

"Oh," he replied. "I forgot that you were missing that. Here, let me help." He stepped forwards and took his phone from her.

"It's not a big deal," she said. "I'll make a new one sometime. You don't need to bother with it."

"It's no problem, really." He was already starting to peel the back panel off his phone. "Ferb can easily handle the finishing touches on the Lacrosse B-11 arena without me." He glanced up apologetically. "I wanted to wait until you got up - to see if you wanted to come build with us - but Buford and Baljeet and Isabella wanted to start, and I felt bad for making them wait, so I kinda let myself get overruled. Did you want to?"

"It's alright," she replied, not wanting to commit to either a fully positive or fully negative answer. "I was kinda just laying around and thinking about stuff anyway." He turned back to his phone, typing rapidly into it.

"Thinking about stuff?"

"You know - last night."

"Ah." he said, but Candace could tell by his tone that he was confused.

Of course he would be - from his point of view, there wasn't really anything to think about. That was the past, it was the way it had been, and there was no real point in thinking too hard about what it had contained. (Unless you were determined to _change_ the past, but that was a bad idea for an entirely different set of reasons.) He'd probably say something to the effect of " _Don't waste your time feeling bad about the past - instead, busy yourself making the present great so that in the future the past is good again or something. Yeah._ " The thought kind of trailed off to no particular ending. She wasn't nearly as great at the whole inspirational speech thing as he was.

"Okay", he remarked after another moment of silence. "I've reprogrammed the teleporter functionality. Now, if I just call you..." He dialed the number. "Okay, it's ringing. So, I press this button - and then the screen will display the approximate location. It's accurate to about three-tenths of a nanometer. I prefer to have stuff calibrated to at least one-tenth, but three was the best I could do on such short notice."

He paused and waited for a moment, watching the phone screen. Lines of GPS data rapidly filled it, eventually resolving down to a single series of long numbers.

"Perfect. Now, I just press here, and - " There was a small flash of purple light, and a small object materialized in the air in front of them, falling to the floor with a thump.

Phineas bent down and picked it up. "And here you go!" He handed it off to her.

"Wow," she replied, looking down at the screen. "Thanks. That was... pretty nifty. Where do you think it was?"

_USB Cable not ejected properly_.

She squinted and dismissed the warning message from her phone's screen.

"It's no problem." Phineas returned. "If you finish thinking about stuff whenever, you can always come out and join us. It'll be fun."

"Okay." She smiled slightly. "I'll keep it in mind. Say, have you ... "

"Hey, Phineas. Whatcha doin'?"

Candace and Phineas both half-turned until they were facing the bedroom door.

"Oh, hey, Isabella. Are you guys done?" Phineas said.

"Yeah." she replied. "We're waiting on you to start. You can be on my team!"

Phineas glanced up at Candace questioningly.

"What were you saying?" he asked. Candace caught the briefest flash of a frown darting across Isabella's face for the lesser part of a second.

"It's nothing." she said. "I'll take care of it." It would only take a few extra minutes to build a metal fabricator and forge her own spoons to eat with. It wasn't even that important, really, but every minute wasted in the house doing stupid things - like messing around with making spoons - was a minute that she didn't have to face her problems head-on. Yes, she was running from her problems. Yes, she knew that it wasn't a permanent solution. But, no, that sure as anything was not going to keep her from doing it anyway.

"You sure?" he asked again. She nodded.

"I'm sure."

"Okay then. Well, if you do want to come out with us later, make sure you do. It'll be fun!"

"I will, don't worry," Candace assured him.

He looked momentarily torn, but then turned and left the room, following Isabella down the stairs and into the backyard. Candace listened quietly until she heard the sliding glass door shut, then she opened up her phone and looked at the notifications waiting for her attention. She winced involuntarily at the sheer amount. The text messages from Stacy and Jeremy had piled up since last night, though she could pretty well imagine their contents. There was even a handful of missed calls - which was unusual in and of itself, because in times past, she rarely got any calls, having instead been the one doing the calling.

Should she look at the messages? Probably. But ignorance is bliss, right? As long as she didn't open the messages, then she could plead innocent of whatever they contained. And right now she had more important things to do.

_'More important'_ , she thought. _Right, because the fact that_ you _can't handle telling the truth to the people you are supposed to be the closest with is now_ their _fault as well._

Even as she internally berated herself for it, however, she nonetheless shoved her phone deep into her pocket with the messages unread, and walked downstairs to the living room. She stopped for a minute to look out the sliding glass door at her brother's creation for today. Well, Phineas hadn't been exaggerating about the arena, that was for sure. Then again, when did he _ever_ have to exaggerate about stuff?

Candace sometimes wondered if her brothers used a Spacial Limitation Re-calibrator to resize the backyard. It surely seemed like it, especially on days like today. There was an entire stadium building of sorts in the backyard, that, miraculously, somehow fit _in_ the backyard. How? It was easily larger than the entire house, and there should have been no way for it to fit in the constraints of the short wooden fence around the yard. And yet it did. The conceptual elasticity of space-time was definitely being stretched to the limit to allow such a thing. She could hear shouts of spectators coming from the stadium, and the distant warble of a color commentator.

(If she strained her ears, she could just make out some of the commentary. "Orange! Chartreuse! Pink!" Color commentary indeed.)

What game were they playing in there again? Some type of lacrosse, hm? It sounded significantly more exciting than regular lacrosse, that was for sure. Maybe she would join them. Later.

_This whole situation is just so stupid,_ she thought.

It was quite literally the worst possible conglomeration of mishaps and backstory revelations ever to happen to any living person. She couldn't even really be mad at anyone besides herself for the the trouble - and she was hard pressed to be mad at herself anyway, considering what she'd done was perfectly justified by what had been on the line at the time. Was it weird that she was mad, then? Just mad. Not mad at anyone, or even anything, just mad? The anger wasn't even a huge thing anymore. It had kinda fizzled out overnight, being replaced with a sort of apathy, that made her feel like throwing in the towel and saying 'screw this, I'm out', and not even bothering to try to fix her old friendships. Of course, she'd probably feel differently if one of them were here. But alone? The idea no longer seemed repulsive, if that said anything.

There was a pile of spare parts and tool just outside the sliding glass door, which she raided for pieces for a small metal fabrication unit. Melting down some extra sheets of scrap, she had soon produced one shiny new spoon. Well, that hadn't been nearly as annoying as it had seemed it might. Returning inside, she set a course for the kitchen.

Sitting in silence eating cereal didn't do much to improve Candace's mood. The peaceful morning spent alone was soon to end, and she knew it, and she wasn't looking forwards to it. Stacy would no doubt be showing up at the house soon, as she normally did - which would mean either breaking the truth to her, or the beginning of another long day of trying to keep it under wraps. Neither option was pleasant, and although the logical parts of her brain were telling her to just break the news and get it over with, something in her still recoiled at the notion.

Yeah, what Phineas had said last night was good and all, and it was probably true, but she still couldn't manage to get off the 'tell or don't tell' seesaw in her mind. Plus, the longer she lied about it, the harder it would be to finally tell the truth. There seemed to be no pleasant way out of this whole deal. It was like being trapped at the bottom of a hole, and longer she sat there, the deeper it got - making it seem like too much trouble to bother climbing out, which served only to make it even deeper.

The cereal was finished long ago, and she listlessly scraped her spoon on the bottom of the bowl, stirring the remaining milk around and around.

"Candace?" a voice at the kitchen door asked, startling her out of her thoughts. It was Stacy - and she hadn't even heard her come in. Uh oh.

"Candace, is everything okay?" Stacy echoed. "I asked your brothers where you were and they told me in here and that I could just come in and find you." She paused. "What's going on?"

"Oh," Candace said after a moment. "Nothing - well, not actually nothing. Something's going on, but - I don't know."

Stacy squinted confusedly at her and pulled out the chair directly across the table.

"Say, what's that?" she asked, pointing at the spoon in Candace's hand. Candace's heart sank a little bit. Well, some of the secret was already out.

"It's - it's a spoon." she finally replied.

"A spoon? What's it for?"

"You know, spooning stuff. Like... soup and cereal and... stuff that's runny."

"Huh." Stacy said meditatively, appearing to mull over the idea. "A _spoon_. That's not a bad idea - I suppose that it _would_ make it easier to eat soup and stuff."

"Mm hmm," Candace assented, mentally adding: _More than you'll ever know_.

"Did Phineas and Ferb invent it?" Stacy asked.

"Yeah, sure," she replied, latching onto the idea as a way of not having to explain where they had actually come from. Because of course Stacy would assume that -that was just the way things worked, right? She was Candace Flynn, she couldn't have ideas, apparently. Such was life permanently overshadowed by her little brothers.

A few moments of silence persisted between them, during which Candace's internal debate grew only hotter.

"Sooo..." Stacy said, sounding unsure of herself. "I know I said I wouldn't bring this up again, but I can tell that something is bothering you. Are you _sure_ you don't want to tell me? You know I can keep a secret if you're worried about _that_."

So the fateful question had been posed. For a few moments more, Candace continued seesawing back and forth between the two possible answers. But the events of yesterday - when she had spent all afternoon and evening trying to lie to her friends - were still annoying fresh in her mind. How had that worked out for her? Not very well. Would her friends still want to be her friends if they knew the truth? Maybe not. But it seemed like lying to them wasn't working that well either. Fighting back the unease in the pit of her stomach, she sat up straighter in her chair and turned to face Stacy head-on.

"I'll tell you." Her words hung in the air like so many thunder clouds. Was this the beginning of the end? "I'll tell you, but please don't think it's weird, alright? I already know that very well."

"Oh, please, Candace," Stacy scoffed. "I don't think anything can shock me any more. I mean, your little brothers are running a full-size sports stadium in your back yard, _right now_ as we speak. Huge devices disappear into thin air every day around here, and you've told me about how I completely missed an apocalypse of pharmacists or whatever. And I believed you, because why shouldn't I? It wasn't the weirdest thing I've heard from you. For goodness sake, your platypus is a secret-uh, secretly very cuddly animal?"

"Secretly cuddly?" Candace asked, raising an eyebrow. "I mean, he's pretty cuddly, I guess. Is he even more so in secret or something?"

"I don't know," Stacy blurted, her face paling slightly. "I know nothing whatsoever about him. I mean, I hardly even see him. Just at the end of the day, usually, when he's doing his usual ordinary platypus things and somebody says 'Oh, there you are, Perry!" and even then I don't really pay attention, I mean, why should I? He's just an ordinary platypus, right? And they don't do much, I mean, that's what everyone says, you know, 'Oh, he's just a platypus, he doesn't'-"

Candace was somewhat confused by the sudden rapid speech. She was trying to do something _very_ uncomfortable here, thank you very much!

" _Forget_ about the platypus!" she interrupted. "Just listen to me, alright? Thank you." Stacy nodded rapidly and scooted her chair closer.

"Okay." Candace took a deep breath. "You know how Phineas and Ferb build stuff? Like, every day, huge stuff. I mean, obviously you know."

Stacy nodded slowly. Candace swallowed the growing ball of nervousness in her throat and pressed forwards.

"So, some stuff happened ... recently, I guess, and basically now I can too." There. It was out. That wasn't so bad, right? She took a deep breath, eyeing Stacy for her reaction.

"What do you mean?" Stacy echoed slowly. "Like, you mean - that you can do what they do? Or is it something else, because I don't really get it if it is."

Candace took another deep breath. "That's exactly what I mean - whatever they can do, or have done in the past, I can now as well. We are now more or less equals when it comes to inventing things, at least as far as I've seen."

"And _that's_ what made you so nervous yesterday?"

"Ah...yes, that's - that's what it was."

"Huh. Wow. I don't really know what to say. Congratulations, I guess? It is kinda neat. But why did you not want to tell me this yesterday?"

Candace winced slightly at the question. But if she was this deep already, she might as well go all the way.

"I - I didn't want anybody to know." she said, suddenly feeling very foolish for ever having wanted so.

"Why not?" Stacy asked. "I mean, you definitely don't care about people seeing you when you go off to bust your brothers, as I'm sure you will demonstrate this afternoon."

"I don't know," she offered lamely. "I was afraid that you'd - you'd hate it or something. You know, like I hated when my brothers did it. You know, because - because it's not normal." The sentence felt stupid as soon as it was out of her mouth. But it really was how she'd felt.

"Candace, please." Stacy crossed her arms. "I seem to remember a time in the not-too-distant past where you got _anatomically fused_ onto Jeremy, and you then tried to spend all day hiding that from me. Now, that doesn't really strike me as normal, if you know what I mean."

"I guess so. I was just worried, you know? I was afraid you wouldn't take this sudden change really well and, I don't know..." her voice trailed off, as she suddenly became unwilling to vocalize what her deepest fears had been directly to her friend's face.

Stacy's eyes momentarily stared off into space, as if she was remembering something. She grinned slightly.

"I think I'm pretty good at handling sudden and completely unexpected revelations entirely changing the way I think about people and things," she finally said. "This isn't the first time."

"I'm glad for that," Candace replied quietly, though at the same time she was a bit curious as to what exactly her friend was referring to. Perhaps some family thing that she didn't know about?

Stacy looked back at her. "So, I take it that you didn't want Jeremy to know either?"

Candace smiled nervously. "Yeah. I... yeah. But I think he's already found out anyway."

"How so?"

"I, uh, well, I guess you could say that I got busted." Candace smiled sheepishly. "Suzy Johnson saw me building a... thing and said she was going to tell her mom on me."

" _Suzy Johnson_?" Stacy echoed. "Candace, that girl is like, what, five? And she's really sweet, too. I don't think she'd actually try to get you in trouble, or that she'd be able to even if she did."

"Sure." Candace shuddered involuntarily at the memory of Suzy's voice from their brief encounter last night. "Sure."

"Besides," Stacy continued, "Don't the things your brothers make always disappear before your mom can see them?"

"The Mysterious Force?" Candace said. "Yeah, they do. But I don't think the Force would protect me like that."

"Well, I definitely don't know anything about that." Stacy replied. "But if it makes you feel any better, I talked to Jeremy on the phone this morning, and he didn't mention anything about a _thing_ built by you."

"You talked to Jeremy?" Candace's curiosity was suddenly piqued. "About what?"

"Well, about you." Stacy said. "He called me this morning, worrying about you after what happened last night. You know, with you claiming allergies and running off from him, and not answering any texts afterwards. What was that all about anyway?"

"Sorry," Candace grimaced, fast becoming embarrassed. "I lost my phone."

"You?" Stacy echoed. "You. You lost your phone?" She sat back in her chair. "Honestly, this surprises me a lot more than you being able to make things like your brothers. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing."

She paused for a moment, thinking, before continuing. "So why _did_ you run off from him - and me?"

Candace grimaced again and sucked in a breath through her teeth. "Because I wanted to build something," she answered at last. "And I didn't want you or him to see me do it."

"Ah. I see." Stacy looked thoughtful. "I think. So it's like your busting then, were you get all freaked out unless you're able to do it?"

"Sort of?" Candace clarified. "It's more like when I get hungry - I have to eat. That's basically the way it goes."

"And... what happens if you don't?" Stacy asked.

"Then I get really bad headaches, and my thoughts sort of mush together, and I can't think about anything else until I get to."

"That's... interesting." Stacy slowly replied. "Is it the same way with Phineas and Ferb?"

Candace nodded.

"I didn't know that. Well, maybe I'm glad I can't do that stuff after all."

"What?" Candace asked, surprised. "You wanted to be able to do this to?"

Stacy shrugged slightly. "Once or twice, maybe." she said. "After I played on the miniature golf course they built that one day. I always thought it was pretty neat, though I never said anything about it. I mean, it _is_ very cool to be able to get an idea and immediately put it into action, no matter how crazy or wild it is. I didn't know it was like a _compulsion_ or anything like that, though."

Candace just stared. This was entirely new information for her.

"Come on," Stacy said, a little defensively. "Don't look at me like that. It's not like a big deal, really."

Candace blinked twice. "I - no." she replied. "I'm sorry. I just - I didn't know that. How come you never said anything?"

"Pfft," Stacy answered. "Well, honestly, because I could never bring up anything remotely related your brother's projects without you going all 'busting' on me. I got my fill of that when there was an actual project going on - I definitely didn't want to bring it up at other times."

"Ha, yeah." Candace swallowed and laughed nervously. "I guess that makes sense."

Stacy leaned back slightly in her chair. "It does. In fact, I'm kinda surprised that you're not doing that now, really." She glanced back at Candace. "Though maybe I shouldn't have brought that up."

"Oh," Candace said. "That's... another thing. The busting, well, I just don't do it anymore. There's no - there's no desire there."

Once again, Stacy seemed shocked.

"What?" she said. "What?"

Candace shifted in her chair and pushed the bowl of by-now room temperature milk away from her.

"It's true." she replied. "That whole thing has been sort of ... usurped, I guess."

"Usurped?" Stacy echoed.

"Yeah." Candace paused and wondered if she should tell her about all of the things she'd seen in the past last night. No, that would just make an already complicated situation even more complicated. Even if the discomfort with spilling the poorly-kept secrets of the past few days was a little abated, it still wasn't entirely gone. Instead, she decided to opt for the simpler explanation.

"I told you I get headaches when I don't make stuff now," she said at last. Stacy nodded. "Well, so do they, well, I think so at least. Either way - it feels just _awful_ , and I'd not even think about doing something that could make somebody feel like that. It's just so ... horrible." She shuddered slightly at the memory. This was most definitely not a lie, even if it wasn't the whole entire truth.

"I'm ... sorry? I guess?" Stacy replied. "Is that the appropriate response for something like that?"

"No, it's alright," Candace hastened to explain. "It's not a huge deal - like, really, if you sort of just relax then you get plenty of time to keep it from becoming an issue. Because you can feel it, you know? It only sort of springs up on you when you try too hard to squash it." Her own sentence echoed and re-echoed loudly in her ears.

"I see," Stacy said slowly. Then she shook her head and laughed. "No, I really don't. But, I'll trust you to handle it - you seem better equipped to do it than me anyway."

"Hardly." Candace snorted. "I don't know how they manage to do it sometimes."

"Well," Stacy pointed out. "It seems like you're managing just fine now."

"I am, aren't I?" Candace's eyes opened slightly wider as she suddenly realized what her friend had said. "I guess I am."

"Compared to yesterday? Yeah, I'd say so."

Candace turned until she was once again facing her friend.

"Stace, honestly, I'm really glad you're taking this so smoothly. I was really nervous about this thing, you know? I was afraid that, well..." her voice trailed off and she again became reluctant to admit just what she had feared to her friends' face.

"You've got to admit that it's kind of cool," Stacy replied. "I know that you told me a while ago to not get seduced by the coolness, but come on. It's _really_ cool."

"It is," Candace admitted. "And it's way better than busting, really, because at least now I can get some measure of satisfaction from it."

"I don't know - I mean - I never really knew why you wanted them busted for those projects so badly anyway."

Candace didn't answer immediately, turning over in her mind what she should say. The motives behind her life-long goal were many, and were all various degrees of convoluted.

"It was... complicated," she said at last. "I was worried that they might get hurt, and I was... well, I was jealous that they could just do that stuff - stuff that I could never do." It was really embarrassing to be admitting that she had been jealous of her little brothers, but it had been true. Stacy didn't seemed surprised or shocked at all by the statement, however.

"That's reasonable," she replied. "I never really considered what it must have been like for you living in the house with them, seeing them do all that stuff every day. I mean, you should hear my little sister when she gets to help them every so often. I swear she doesn't shut up about it for a week after. I can't tell you how many times I've heard 'Did you hear what I did at the giant car wash last month?' or 'Did you hear my part in the song for Phineas and Ferb's latest project?'. She's got it pretty bad. I'm like, 'Ginger, please, Candace made very sure that I got a very good look at whatever her brothers did. You don't have to explain it to me again.'"

"Oof." Candace exhaled. "That car wash. I didn't need to shower for like a week after that. Literally. I smelled like the inside of a new car for a week."

"Yes, I've heard this from you too." Stacy smiled bemusedly. "I know, you got waxed. I'm sorry I missed it."

Candace waved her off. "It was my fault, really, I _should've_ been paying more attention. I do wish they had at least put up a sign or something. 'Strongly Magnetic Belt'. That would have been nice."

"Why didn't you just slip off your shoes?" Stacy asked.

Candace looked at her out of the corner of her eye. "You try having the presence of mind to say 'Oh, I'll just slip off my shoes' when that happens to _you_. That was the _farthest_ thing from my mind at that point."

"Fair enough."

Silence settled over them for a few moments, but a large portion of Candace's unease had been put to rest, and the silence didn't seem quite so oppressive. But there was still one problem on her mind.

"Do you think that Jeremy will mind?" she asked. "You know, all this stuff."

"I am such an enabler," Stacy said under her breath, so quietly that Candace almost didn't catch the words. "Candace," she said out loud. "Try to look at it this way. For years now you've been basically entirely ignoring people's opinions of you to go off and bust your brothers. Why start bothering now? And if you can actually do what your _brothers_ can do, then I don't think you really _should_ care."

"Mmm." Candace nodded. "I see you and Phineas both went to the same 'Inspirational Speech School'."

"But I'm right."

Candace sighed."Yes. You're right, I guess. But that's - that's not gonna make it any easier on me to tell him."

"I don't know." Stacy shrugged. "Really, that's on you. But how hard can it be? Jeremy's lived in Danville for at least the majority of his life. I highly doubt this piece of news will be the weirdest thing he'd heard."

"I suppose so." Candace relented. "He _did_ seem to like that time Phineas and Ferb turned our house into a fun house."

"They turned your house into a fun house? Man, where was I for that?"

"I don't know. I just remember that day because it was one of the couple of days that the Mysterious Force sort of took over me, and made me clean it all up before Mom could see it."

"Ah..." Stacy nodded knowingly. "Because that was totally some obscure cosmic force and not you wanting to keep your brothers out of trouble?"

"No, it was definitely the Force." Candace shook her head. "Heck, it made me _eat_ their entire project one day. It was bigger than the house! My stomach did _not_ thank me for that later. I don't think I've been able to look at licorice the same way since." She stopped when she noticed Stacy staring at her. "What?"

"So... are you going to call him?"

"I will." Candace looked down at the floor. "Later."

"Candace," Stacy said. "You really shouldn't wait - and I don't think you would if you heard what I did when he called me this morning."

Candace looked up worriedly. "What did he say?"

"You ask _him_ what he said." Stacy shook her head.

Candace glared at her, but she remained firm. "Alright, alright. I'll call him. But I _swear_ that you'd better stay right here while I do."

Candace reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She hesitated slightly, but at last opened up her contact list and hovered her finger over the correct number. She bit her lip. This was the moment of truth, then? Taking a deep breath, she commanded herself to be calm, then pressed the button.

Raising the phone to her ear, she listened to it ring. One ring - two rings - three - and with a click, the line was picked up.

"Candace? Is that you?" Jeremy's voice came from the other end of the phone. Suddenly, her voice was gone, and she could feel her old fear building back up inside of her.

"Is anybody there?" he asked. She had to do something, something to break the fear that was freezing her words in her throat.

"HI," she said, far and away too loudly. But the ice was broken.

"It is you, Candace!" he replied. "Are you okay?"

"I'm - I'm fine."

"Okay." He sounded relieved. "I was worried when you didn't answer any of my texts after last night."

"I - I - I lost my phone." She was still tripping over her words for some reason. "Sorry."

"Oh." There was a pause. "I didn't know that. Are you feeling any better this morning?"

Now came the first of two uncomfortable admissions. But she could do it. Phineas had been right again, as he always was. Stacy had handled the news just fine - more than fine, really. She'd taken it so smoothly that it almost threw Candace off. But, then again, Stacy had said that she was used to 'dramatic revelations changing how she perceived people' or whatever that was supposed to mean.

"You there?"

"Yes!" she replied quickly. "Look, Jeremy, I, uh, I wasn't sick last night. There was nothing wrong with my allergies at all, actually."

"What?" He was sounding confused now. "Then what was it?"

She inhaled deeply.

"There were some dramatic events recently that made me able to create things on a similar scale as my little brothers and with that came a sort of need to do it every so often that I was afraid you would be around to see and that it would negatively affect our relationship so I made that whole thing up to get away so that I could build something without you seeing it." She gasped for air at the end of the long speech.

"What?" he echoed. "Can you say that again, like a little bit slower? I didn't catch it all. Did you say your brothers did something? I mean, that's sort of what I guessed, but it didn't quite add up."

Candace took another breath, and started again, slower this time. "No, it wasn't them. It - it was me. Some stuff happened on... Thursday and I became able to build things like they can." She gritted her teeth and waited for the response.

"Really?" Jeremy asked. "What stuff?"

"Just stuff," she repeated, unwilling to go into any further detail. "Stuff with time travel and ... stuff."

"Time travel. Riiiiiiight." There was another nervewracking pause on the line. "Wait, so you can really do what they do?"

"That's correct," Candace replied. "And it's not so much that I can, even. I _have_ to, also like them."

"So those posters I saw hanging up at the mall concourse today advertising the world's first game of Lacrosse B-11: you built that?"

"Well, no - that's still Phineas and Ferb. But I could have."

"And the roller coaster yesterday?"

Candace winced at the question. "No, I didn't help build that one either. Though it was my idea."

There was another long pause.

"Sorry." Jeremy laughed for a moment. "It's just - I mean, wow. It's kind of cool. But why did you leave so early last night then? Because you wanted to build something?"

"Well, sort of." She paused. This was going to be the tricky part to explain. "See, I didn't want anybody to know about what I could do, which led to me going all day without actually building anything. Only problem with that is that you can't really do that. I _have_ to build stuff. So do my brothers, although they're able to go for longer than I can. I guess it's because they've had it longer. More tolerance, you know?"

"I... guess?" he said, sounding confused. "You know, this does kind of help make some sense out of what happened last night."

"What happened last night?" Now she was _really_ nervous.

"I don't know the whole story, but my mom told me that Suzy ran across town and got your mom and my mom, and made them both drive to some construction site with some story about you building a house? It didn't make any sense at the time. Of course, when they got there, there was nothing there, so I didn't think anymore of it. But you're telling me this now, so it makes me wonder if Suzy was actually telling the truth."

Candace's eyes opened wide. So the Mysterious Force had protected her after all. She was lucky that Suzy had decided to get her own mother as well, instead of just Mrs. Johnson. That was doubtlessly what had triggered the Force, because Linda Flynn-Fletcher was seemingly the only person that could activate it.

"Yes," she admitted. "I did actually build a house, and probably where Suzy said I did." She wasn't quite sure why she told the truth about that - after all, it seemed to be just asking for trouble - but for some reason she did.

"Huh," Jeremy said. "Well, whaddaya know." Similarly to what Stacy had predicted, the fact that she had indeed built a house didn't seem to surprise him at all. Then again, as Stacy had also pointed out, living in a place like Danville did sort of desensitize you to things like that. Sometimes she wondered if other cities were also like this. In her short trips to London and Paris she hadn't immediately seen anything strange, but she supposed that Danville too seemed fairly normal on the surface.

"Yeeeeah," Candace drawled into silence. Despite her pounding heart, this was actually going... okay.

"So, how does this play into the whole 'busting' thing?"

"It doesn't, really." she answered. "It pretty much replaced it, actually." There was no need to go into detail about withdrawing if he didn't asked. She was perfectly fine without him asking, to be honest. It was not a very pleasant subject to talk about.

"What... do you mean?" Jeremy was obviously unsure of how to respond.

"It replaced it," she repeated. "It's just not a thing anymore. Which is good, in a way. I mean, I tried and failed at it for years and years and at least now I can do something that gives me a sense of satisfaction."

"Yeah," he replied. "When you put it like that, I guess it is kind of good."

"Mmm hmm." Now it was her turn to be unsure of how to continue the conversation. She looked across the table at Stacy, who was still sitting in the chair, waiting for her to finish talking.

"Well," he resumed awkwardly, "I mean, at least you're okay. I was kinda worried after you insisted on leaving by yourself last night."

Candace could tell by the tone of his voice that he wanted to know _why_ she had left, but for some reason he was dancing around actually saying so. "I'm fine. I am sorry I left so abruptly. It was kinda rude. I'm sorry." She paused, once again feeling embarrassed by admitting to her friends just what she had thought they might do. "I was afraid that it would make you think bad of me," she finally admitted. "I'm sorry." She heard him breathe a deep breath, as if of relief.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "Out of all the things I've seen at your house, I think I can handle _this_ just fine."

Candace smiled slightly. "That's what Stacy said too."

"I don't doubt it. Honestly, I was just really worried that I did something wrong. I'm glad to hear that it wasn't my fault - though I'm sorry if I made you feel like you had to hide anything from me."

"Well, it _wasn't_ you. It was just me being dumb. I'm sorry."

"Well, I'm glad that everything's okay now. It is, isn't it?"

"Yeah." Candace paused. "Yeah, I am too."

"So..." he said after another pause. "Is it okay if I come over today after work? We can go get ice cream again, or maybe watch the Lacrosse game. These posters your brothers put up here in the mall make it look pretty attractive."

Candace smiled. "That sounds fine," she replied. "I'll see you then."

"Alright then. It'll be about eleven thirty or twelve. Oh - I've got to go, my break's over in twenty seconds. I'll see you this afternoon. Bye."

"Bye." With a _click_ , Candace hung up the call and sat her phone down on the table.

"Well?" Stacy asked.

"Okay, you were right," Candace admitted. "That wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting."

"What did I tell you?" Stacy smiled smugly. "Danville does things to people. Heck, just being around your brothers on a regular basis does things to people."

"I know, I know." Candace repeated. "I know." Even as she said the words, they felt like a final goodbye to any last hope of having a normal life. But as she watched the pipe dream swirl away, she realized that maybe it wasn't such a bad thing after all. Phineas was right again. Who could have guessed?

"Come on." Candace pushed away from the table and stood up. "Let's go see what Phineas and Ferb are doing."

No, the world was not the same as it had been at the beginning of the week. For better or for worse, the course of the universe had been irrevocably shifted around her. Maybe it was time to just get used to it. This was the way things were. This was the new normal. No amount of wishful thinking or quantum meddling could put things back the way they were, so maybe she should embrace it. And maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't be so bad after all.

_Hm._ Candace thought. _And m_ _aybe I'm not so bad at inspirational quotes after all._


	17. A Brand New Normal

The sliding glass door squeaked slightly as Candace pushed it aside, and stepped out into the backyard. The house and the yard were bathed in shadow, as the towering stadium in the middle of the yard blocked out the afternoon sun. The yard was quiet, however. The constant shouts and ruckus from the stadium were no longer present. She took this to mean that the game had ended, and that the spectators had already left. It was just about that time: a little before lunch, not too long before Linda would normally be due home, but still long enough for all the evidence of their construction to be removed by the Force before she actually got home.

Of course, her parents wouldn't be home till later today anyway, because of the convention, but Phineas and Ferb ran on an almost clockwork-like schedule on summer days and today was no exception, even though summer was already technically over.

"It's pretty big," Stacy said, craning her neck up at it. "Guess I shouldn't be surprised."

They covered the short distance from the back door to the double glass doors marking the stadium entrance. As they stepped into the tiled lobby, Candace could feel Stacy's eyes on her back.

"Why are you staring at me?" she asked at last.

"Nothing," Stacy replied, shaking her head. "It's just - it's so weird to see you like this."

"Like what?" Candace said, though she had an idea of what was meant.

"Like this," Stacy repeated, gesturing around to the interior of the well-lit lobby. "I mean, I know you said that busting isn't a thing anymore, but I can't get over how weird it is to be actually standing _inside_ one of your brother's projects and see you so calm."

"I guess." She looked at a large building map hanging on the wall.

"I'm half-expecting you to suddenly flip and start screaming at me," Stacy said. "It's just so weird. Sorry. I'll get used to it."

Candace smiled slightly. "Don't worry. I'd be lying if I said I was completely used to it myself. It's just - I _could_ go try to get Mom, you know, but I just don't _want_ to."

"Your mom is going to get worried if you don't," Stacy pointed out. "It's happened before."

"You're right." That _could_ be a problem.

"Eh," she decided at last. "The Mysterious Force'll just take this thing away anyway. I mean, I think. Yeah, it should." Candace thought back briefly over her years of dealing with the Force. Occasionally it didn't activate when she hadn't tried to bust her brothers, but that could easily be due to the fact that without her busting, her mother wouldn't have seen the project anyway. Hence, there was no need to remove the project.

"Having trouble reading that map?" Stacy's voice broke into her thoughts.

"Hm? Oh, no, I just wasn't paying attention." She quickly redirected her attention at the map. So, the lobby was marked by that golden star. Where would her brothers be? Maybe her phone...

Her thoughts were interrupted by the 'ding' of an elevator as a set of doors on the other side of the lobby slid open.

"So _that's_ why you dislike Bulgarian folk dancing," her brother was saying to Ferb. "Huh. I never really thought of it like that. Still, I can't help but like it, even knowing that. But it's a fair objection." He noticed them standing there and quickly changed the subject. "Hey Candace. Did you get to see any of the game?"

"No," she said apologetically. "Who won?"

"Buford and Baljeet's team." he said. "But we didn't give it to them without a fight."

"Oh?"

"Yeah," Phineas continued. "It was a close game. And exciting! Isabella and I went into the fifth sector with a score of the cube root of pi. Ferb and Irving had three coconuts, and Buford and Baljeet had two crudely drawn pictures of a duck. I know that kinda makes it sound like we had it in the bag, but then, in that all-important fifth sector, while I was busily defending Isabella's and my third of the apple-slicing counter (and not paying close enough attention, really), Buford managed to get a lucky nacho cheese balloon throw on our team flag. That led to a unicycle sudden death round, with the 'on a tightrope' modifier, which really messed up our lead. We never really came back from that point, actually."

"I've got to say, that sounds awfully confusing," Stacy said. "Apple slicing? Nacho cheese? Unicycles? I thought the posters said this was _lacrosse_."

"It was lacrosse-themed," he explained. "We thought it best to spice it up a bit. The influence of the original game may have been lost a bit under all the spice, I admit."

"That sounds... interesting," Candace said slowly, though she was similarly unable to see even the slightest hint of lacrosse-related themes in the description of the game her brother had given. Maybe it was one of those things you had see to understand. "So where is everybody else?"

"Different places," Phineas replied. "Isabella had a Fireside Girls meeting, and - actually, I don't know where exactly Buford and Baljeet went. Irving, well, he _said_ he left, but you can't tell with him." Phineas stopped to study the corners the room, presumably hunting for security cameras, but he found none. At last, he shrugged. "Meh."

"So..." Stacy said, "I'll bet you're both kinda weirded out about how your sister is acting right now too, hm?"

Phineas looked confused for a second, then a look of comprehension swept over his face.

"Yeah, totally," he said, reaching up to scratch behind his ear. "Yeah. Yeah." He seemed extremely uncomfortable, so Candace thought it high time to come to his rescue.

"It's alright," she said. "It's no secret anymore."

"What?" Stacy seemed surprised, but quickly shook it off. "Well, I guess I can't _really_ blame you for telling them first. I mean, it's probably what I would have done too."

"Plus we had some... exigent circumstances," Phineas added. "What with being in another dimension and all."

"You were in another dimension?" Stacy was shocked again. "When was this? I've seen you every day for like, ever. Then I miss one day, Thursday, only to find that you went dimension-hopping?"

Candace frowned briefly. Of course, Phineas wouldn't have picked up on the fact that Candace hadn't exactly told her friend of all the exact details of the past week or so. She mentally told him to please just leave the subject alone, but knew well enough that the unspoken message would never make it through. Okay then. She may as well try to take control of this while that was still an option.

"Time travel," she said, before anyone else could get another word out. "We got back before we left, so in essence, we were never gone at all."

Phineas glanced up at her, surprised. "Yeah - pretty much, though it was a bit more complex than _just_ that."

"Whoa," Stacy remarked. "That's - pretty crazy. So, this is actually the second time I've lived through these days? What was it like the first time? Can you predict the future?"

"We've got no idea." Phineas shook his head and smiled. "Remember, we were in another dimension, so we completely missed the first time these days went around."

Of course, that wasn't _entirely_ true. Candace had been here for good few days on the 'first time around'. But his simplified answer was more than enough, she reasoned. There was no need to go into excessive detail over explaining something that would really make no difference in Stacy's life anyway.

"That's... pretty crazy." Stacy finally answered. "But aren't you worried about causing, you know, the end of the universe of something of that sort?"

"What? Through a paradox?" he echoed. "Nah. Paradoxes aren't destructive - they aren't anything, actually. They just _are_. Now, if you mean through a destructive time loop, well, we've already seen one of those, and it seems to have resolved itself just fine. Though I still don't know just how it actually _started_ in the first place."

"The chances of a destructive time loop developing spontaneously _are_ exceedingly remote." Ferb spoke up.

"Yeah," Phineas repeated, suddenly getting meditative. "And a spontaneous loop that, for some reason, _didn't_ include Candace?"

"Well," Candace interrupted nervously, before this train of thought could go too far. "You know what they say: Never question the source of a quantum entanglement time loop ... thingy." She could do just fine without everyone knowing that she had been the one to start the loops in the first place - because she had been having a bad day and had thought that surely that justified tearing the space time continuum to rectify. Of course, at the time she hadn't known that the Do-Over Inator Doofenshmirtz had built was going to tear the continuum, but still.

"Hm?" her brother looked up, his thoughts interrupted.

"Yeah," Stacy agreed. "I think I've heard that." Candace looked at her out of the corner of her eye. What was she even talking about?

"It doesn't matter now," Phineas decided. "All that matters is that the loops resolved themselves - so we're good."

Candace breathed a small sigh of relief. She was thankful that Phineas had such a relaxed approach to things. For someone who could have fairly easily found out just about everything about anything even slightly strange, he was usually content to just sit back and go with the flow, accepting odd happenstance as just that, and nothing more.

"So, you wanna see the rest of the stadium?" he continued, gesturing around at the lobby.

Somewhat thankful for the change of subject, she pounced on the offer. "Sure!"

Okay, that was probably a bit _too_ enthusiastic. But she did kind of want to see the rest of the building - and the tour would help make absolutely sure that the 'where did the time loops come from' conversation had been put to rest. Which would also be good.

"Sure," Stacy said as well, though she sounded slightly less excited. "Is there anything that makes this a lot different from a regular stadium?"

"Not particularly," Phineas replied, "But we do have free licorice dispensers." and he pointed to a small brown box affixed to one wall.

Candace shuddered at the name of the treat that had become entirely vile to her. Phineas stepped over to the box and pressed the button, retrieving four sticks of candy and passing them out. "No thanks," she said, turning down the one he held out to her.

He seemed surprised, but passed over it without more than a moment's thought. "Okay." He took a bite of the licorice stick. "Let's start by checking out the computer control room. Honestly, it's probably the single feature that sets this place apart the most from a regular stadium. It controls - well, it controls everything. You'll see when we get there."

He led them across the lobby and back into the elevator, pressing a red button labeled ' **CR** '. The doors slid smoothly shut behind them, and the elevator rose smoothly upwards for a few seconds. With a 'ding', the doors re-opened, facing into a small room.

Huge windows covered every wall, affording excellent views in every direction. You could see the whole stadium from up here, far above the highest available seating, high enough to see the whole place at once. There were three desks, with three large computer monitors set up on them.

"This is the brains of the whole operation," Phineas said proudly. He picked up a microphone from the nearest desk and spoke into it. "Testing, one, two."

Outside, his voice thundered through powerful speakers that amplified it thousands of times and made it reverberate throughout entire building.

"This is how we control the game as well," he continued. "If it's time for the fish rain bonus round, for example, you just press this button and - - -"

" **Sudden Death Bonus Round!** " an automated voice thundered through the speakers outside. **"Fish Rain! All contestants, grab as many pounds of fish as possible in the next thirty seconds. Winner takes all!** "

"Well, the fish cannons are empty." He pointed towards a computer screen. "But you get the idea."

"Was there really fish rain bonus rounds in your game?" Stacy asked incredulously. "The more I hear about this game, the more ridiculous it sounds. Guess that's par for the course."

"You should have been here for the F-Games," Candace said. "I was _in_ them, and I'm still not sure that I have the rules down pat. The only thing I remember for absolute certain is that if the front player on the boys' team misses the third shuttlecock with his rubber chicken, his teammate in the rear of the horse costume must jump over the chokecherry bush _after_ the girls finish peeling their tangerines. Not before."

"Wow." Stacy shook her head. "Now I see why you like Skiddley Whiffers so much. I never could stand games with a thousand complex rules."

"It's not that complicated," Phineas said. "The official rule book for the F-Games is only two-hundred and twenty three pages long." He paused for moment, then laughed. "I guess that's a bit more complicated than your average game, but still."

"A bit more complicated," Stacy repeated. "A bit. Yes. _Just_ a bit."

"It was still pretty fun." Candace mused. "Though I did get hit in the face with an awful lot of watermelons."

Stacy grinned. "Well, I'm not surprised. I mean, have you guys ever done anything that wasn't fun?"

The question was clearly meant to be rhetorical, and Candace was just about to respond in a similarly joking manner, but she was cut off by her brother.

"Actually, one day we thought we should try crocheting. I thought it would be great idea, but it didn't turn out so well. And by 'not turn out so well', I mean that it was awfully boring and we agreed to never to do it again." He paused. "Except Buford. Buford loved it. I still can't figure out why."

This piece of information surprised even Candace. She hadn't known about this incident before. Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised her that much - after all, despite all the things her brothers were or were not, they were also just people. And some people just don't like some things. And crocheting? Well, if it was boring enough to be rejected by her brothers, then she decided that it was definitely boring enough to be rejected by her.

Stacy laughed. "Well, I don't think having one thing that you find boring is that big a deal. There's a lot of stuff that I can't stand, and I don't think I turned out too bad."

"No, of course not," Phineas agreed. "Everyone's got something they don't like. At least it was fun hanging out with everybody, even if the crocheting really didn't do much to help in that regard."

He stepped back over to one of the computers closest to him and pressed a rapid combination of buttons. "There's someone here. Hmm. Are you guys expecting anybody? They don't have a staff pass or a ticket so I'll have to buzz them in."

Candace swallowed, sure that she did in fact know the person. "Can you get some sort of camera footage or something?"

"Camera?" he hummed under his breath. "Yeah, I can get a camera. Ferb?"

Ferb sat down in a chair and rolled over to the desk on the other side of the small control room. He quickly entered a long string of text into the waiting screen. It flickered with static for just a moment, then the system terminal disappeared, being replaced with a video feed of the stadium's front doors. Sure enough, it was Jeremy, just as she'd expected. Alright then - it seemed like it was time for the final obstacle between her and being at peace with all the drastic developments of the past week.

"Oh..." Phineas said slowly. "It's Jeremy. Alright, give me a second to buzz him in."

"No, it's okay," Candace cut in. "I wanna go down and meet him."

Phineas looked up at her, silent for a moment. "Oh, yeah. You want us to come with you or should we leave through the back entrance?"

Candace smiled to herself. "He knows, Phineas." she said aloud, putting to ease the worry that she had a feeling was knocking around inside her brother. She rolled her eyes. "I'm sure _everyone_ does now."

He smiled broadly. "Alright. Still, accompany or no?"

The question was an innocent one, and Candace had expected no less from the likes of her brother. But although she was most definitely intent on going down alone, she nonetheless tempered her negative reply from the brashness that it had often taken in times past.

"I'd... prefer if you found another exit?" she said, after thinking for a moment.

Stacy smiled at her. "You got this."

"Thanks," Candace grimaced nervously.

"Well, then what are you wanting for?" she asked, pointing to the open elevator doors behind them. "Get out of here! I have coolness to be seduced by."

Candace smiled again and retreated back to the elevator, pressing the ground floor button.

The doors slid smoothly closed, and the indicator above the doors lit up, giving indication of her progress downwards. A few seconds ticked by as she was in transit, then, with the appropriate sound, the doors slid open and revealed the lobby. Jeremy was already inside, having apparently been let in from the control room. He turned when he heard the elevator open, and his face lit up slightly when he saw her.

"Hey Candace."

"Heeeey." She was starting to feel a bit awkward again.

"So, how are you this afternoon?"

"I'm fine." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "I've just been sort of, you know, waiting around."

"So..." He seemed almost as if he was feeling a bit of the awkward atmosphere himself, which was somewhat of a relief. "So, uh, it's a pretty nifty place isn't it?" He gestured around at the lobby.

"Yeah," she answered. "You should have been here about an hour or two earlier - apparently there were seventy thousand people here."

"Wow." he said. "That's a lot."

"Almost thirty percent of Danville's total population." she replied.

"Really?" he asked. "That's... kinda lot. But I guess it sounds right."

"It is right," she said, almost without thinking. "You know, 70,000 divided by 241,000. It's _technically_ about 29.0456432..." Suddenly, she realized just what she was doing. Rattling off long strings of numbers at her boyfriend? This definitely wasn't something she _should_ be doing.

Jeremy picked up on the sudden stop and smiled at her. "Is this something to do with all the stuff you told me about on the phone?"

She nodded, swallowing. "I - I think so. Sorry."

"Hey, being able to do math like that in your head can be really useful sometimes," he said. "Though based on what you told me, I guess division like that's probably pretty basic compared to the rest of what you can do?"

"Thanks." She breathed a slight sigh of relief. "I mean... yeah, it's... not the hardest thing in the world."

"Hm." He squinted in thought. "Can you do ... the tangent of four-forty-seven divided by the logarithm of seventy-eight multiplied by the cosine of six?"

"Ten point oh two nine four one eight three." The answer was already in her mind with hardly even a conscious effort on her part. Just knowing that the problem needed to be solved had been enough to activate the creative and logical... instinct? in her mind, and it had instantly done what was required of it with almost no conscious effort on her part at all. It was the same strange feeling that she felt after having built the apartment building or the house or the teleportation system - things that logically should have taken at the very least days of work that she had somehow completed in minutes. In Phineas' own words: it defied all logic and common sense. More accurately, it didn't so much defy _logic_ as defy _commonly-accepted_ logic. It was a small, yet very significant, distinction.

"Well," Jeremy said. "I mean, I don't have any way of knowing if that's right or not. I was kinda just making up random numbers." He looked around at the inside of the stadium lobby. "Though considering what I'm standing in right now, I really don't think I have any reasonable right to doubt your answer. At least you'll have a pretty easy time of it when school starts again?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Candace replied. She'd never struggled too much in school anyway, but this ability would definitely help somewhat at least in math and science classes. Actually, it probably wouldn't be that helpful in science: mostly since she now knew that a lot of the stuff covered in science textbooks was wildly inaccurate. Take the old laws of thermodynamics, for instance. Energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. _Riiiiiight_. Sure.

"So, you want to go somewhere or something?" Jeremy asked after a pause. "I mean, we can try going to the park again if you want. After all, you didn't get to eat any of your ice cream last time."

"Alright." She smiled. "That sounds nice. I'll... try not to run off this time."

He reached over and grabbed ahold of the door of the stadium, pushing it open for her. They stepped out of the lobby and into the backyard. The sun had moved across the sky by a significant amount, casting the shadow of the stadium in the direction opposite to the way it had been lying earlier that day.

The sound of a car horn cut through the otherwise silent air, and a small red station wagon pulled up into the driveway. Was it three o'clock already? Wow. The time had definitely flown by.

Jeremy paused in his walk and turned to back to face the large building towering up from the backyard. It wasn't hard to tell what he was thinking.

"Wondering where it's gonna go?"

"Kinda?" he replied. "I always heard you say that your mom never got to see your brother's stuff, but I didn't know that they cut it so close with the getting rid of it."

"Oh, it's not them," Candace said. "They've got no more clue about why or where than you do."

Jeremy raised his eyebrows. "What?"

"It's some Mysterious Force," she explained. "It's like... this sort of sentient force that follows me around, and makes sure that I can never show anything abnormal to Mom. Don't ask me why, or how. All I know is that it's been this way my entire life so far - and so far doesn't show any signs of letting up."

"That's ... weird." He scratched his head for a moment. "But if it's _just_ you, couldn't you just get someone else to do it for you?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" she replied. "But nope. The Force can tell with stuff like that, something that I know from loads of experience. There's no getting around it, really. Even Phineas himself couldn't pull it off."

"Hey, kids!" Linda Flynn-Fletcher broke in, swinging open the wooden gate and stepping into the backyard. "How are you, Jeremy?"

"I'm good, Mrs. Flynn-Fletcher." he answered,  then turned back to the stadium. "Wh-whoa. It's gone. Okay, now that _is_ freaky."

"Mmm hmm." Candace smiled. "Told ya so." Truth be told, this whole lack of busting urge was still new, and entirely pleasant, to her. To be able talk about her brother's inventions and the Mysterious Force, and have the Force act right before her eyes, without being thrown into a seething rage was certainly enjoyable. It may not sound like much, but to her it was definitely something worth note.

"What's gone?" Linda asked curiously.

"Oh, it was nothing," she replied calmly before Jeremy could answer. "Just this _giant_ sports stadium that held almost a third of the entire city for a widely-publicized sporting event." Wow. This was super nice. She could get used to this.

Linda raised her eyebrows, and a look of concern and suspicion crossed her face. "You didn't call me once today, Candace. I would've come home sooner, if I couldn't gotten away any quicker. It really was a little worrying. Are you sure everything's okay? Where are Phineas and Ferb?"

Candace turned to look at the lone backyard tree. Huh. Her brothers weren't actually there. That... was unusual. The Force normally made sure they were always there.

Just then, however, the sliding glass door slid open, and Phineas poked his head out. "Hey, Mom!" he called. "Did you have fun at the convention?"

"Huh," Linda mumbled under her breath. Then she shrugged and walked quickly across the yard. "Oh yes," she said to Phineas. "Loads of it. Antiquing. What fun! No, it was quite alright." She stepped into the house and pulled the glass door shut behind her.

"Don't your brothers wonder where all their stuff goes?" Jeremy asked, when it was just the two of them again.

"Not really," she replied. "They prefer to do something new everyday anyway, so to them the Force is - is like this super-convenient cosmic janitor that takes care of all their clean-up for them."

"If that floats their boat, I guess," he said slowly, shrugging. "Still, I can't get over how _weird_ that is."

"Eh. You get used to it. Besides, how can the fact that overly-advanced technology and oversized buildings _disappear_ from my backyard everyday be weirder than the fact that overly-advanced technology and oversized buildings are _built_ in my backyard everyday?"

"I don't know," he echoed. "It seems awfully hard to get used to. But whatever. Let's go get some ice cream."

"Alright." She smiled. So far, this... wasn't actually all that bad.

But yet another interruption was destined to halt their already minimal progress in that regard. The sliding glass door opened again, and Phineas stepped out into the backyard.

"Candace," he said, walking up to her. "Can I... talk to you for a second?"

Now, she was somewhat inclined to immediately say _No_ and _I'm with my boyfriend_ , but something in her brother's face killed her objections before they could be made.

"Sure?" she said instead, a little unsure why she said it. "What is it?"

"Okay." He looked strangely serious - certainly a look that did not cross his face very often. There was a moment's worth of pause, not a long moment by any means, but still long enough for Candace to tell that something was, in fact, up.

"I guess it's kinda my fault," he said at last. "I should have realized that something like this was bound to happen, and acted preemptively. So, in that way, I'm sorry."

"For what?" she asked, growing more confused as time went by. Jeremy too, looked somewhat puzzled, though it probably wasn't for the same reasons.

"Look," Phineas launched into speech. "When you build stuff, well, you shouldn't use stuff that isn't yours. I mean, I'm sure whatever you built was completely awesome, but still. The supplies didn't belong to you. They belonged to someone else - someone else who paid for them, someone else who was going to use them."

His point immediately became clear to her. _Of course!_ How could she have so stupid? That house she'd built last night. All those supplies that had been lying around, that she had so quickly appropriated for herself to use. Supplies that were no longer anywhere to be found, now that the Mysterious Force had removed her creation.

Uh oh.

This wasn't good at all. How much had all that stuff been worth? Danville was rather small city, as cities go, and crime was also generally on the low end of the scale. Something like this would definitely be a big deal. Her eyes grew wider and wider as her mind raced, conjuring up images of police and courtrooms and prison. What had she done? The Mysterious Force could do a lot, but it couldn't make all this go away, could it? Cold fear built up in the pit of her stomach.

"No, no, it's okay," Phineas assured her, easily reading her whitened face. "Ferb and I were able to... handle it this time. We ate the fines and handsomely compensated the owner, in return for him agreeing to not press charges." He paused briefly again. "But still. That's not... something that you should be going around doing."

"Y-yeah," Candace stammered, embarrassed beyond all belief, yet still relieved at his words. Once again, her brothers had come to her rescue. "S - sorry." The weak apology sounded almost worthless in her ears. Phineas hadn't specified exactly what compensation he and Ferb had paid out, but she knew for sure that it would be no small amount. She felt as if she had to explain herself, even to just soothe her suddenly active conscience. "I - I wasn't thinking straight. I was withdrawing, and my head was - - -"

"It's alright." Phineas held up his hand and smiled. "We figured that was what had made you do it. I know that when it really gets down to the nitty and gritty, those headaches are really nasty, and it feels like there's nothing you can do."

Candace nodded vigorously. _Yes_. She was relieved that he understood.

"And that's why it's kinda my fault too," he continued. "When you didn't build the roller coaster with us yesterday morning, I should have realized that eventually the withdrawals were gonna catch up to you, and there might not necessarily be a ... _legal_ way to relieve them."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of shiny red plastic and held it out to her. "That being said, I'll do now what I should have done then. Here."

She reached out and took it, looking down at the small object. It was a card. A debit card - embossed with her name and emblazoned with a small logo that she'd never seen before. "What's this? You and Ferb don't have a bank account."

"You're right," he replied. "In fact, you might say we're a little too young to have a bank account of our own. But that's not technically nor legally mine. Or Ferb's. It's hooked up to the account of our corporation. We incorporated years ago, after finding out that like so many other other legal documents, Articles of Incorporation have no minimum age specified." He paused. "It helps manage expenses and... other stuff like that."

"Oh." Candace was surprised, but not by any large amount. It was still more news, though. Not only did her brothers have budgets and expenses, but they also ran their own corporation. What was next, finding out that they held seats on the city council? Oh, wait. She already knew that they did. For her being so much taller than they were, they certainly cast a large shadow - one that she often felt like it had completely swallowed her up.

"Yeah," Phineas continued. "I drew up some papers, and if you'll just sign for me later tonight, then I can officially put you down as an employee, and issue you this corporate expense card. You can use it to get supplies for your projects, should you want or need too. There's no limit, just, uh, be mindful of what you spend. We don't have infinite money, you know, and our daily projects, well, they're up there on the expense chart." He made a gesture with hands, seemingly indicating the size of the numbers that the projects cost.

She didn't doubt it. A skyscraper of average height and size could easily cost a good billion dollars. Now imagine that, applied to a skyscraper _that literally reached the moon_. Her quick mental math spat out a whopping figure of 644 trillion dollars.

"So I'll be... _working_ for you?" she asked. The idea was interesting, although not necessarily in a _completely_ negative way. Still... her little brothers really did tower over her sometimes. It was a little annoying and kind of made her feel... self-conscious sometimes. And this would definitely be another example of that. Still, at this point, it wasn't really a choice, was it? And it _was_ a kind gesture, she supposed, studying the card in her hand. _Other people_ might judge her for being so... useless compared to her brothers, but her brothers themselves never would. 

"Only technically," Phineas was saying. "You'll do zero hours a week, which at minimum wage is zero dollars a week. It's for the legal side of things, really. So we can justify setting up an expense account, the same way Ferb and I do. Except since we're too young to quote unquote 'have a job', we sit on the board of directors as majority stockholders. There's a lot more complicated legal workarounds that more or less nullify our age. Ferb usually takes care of it. He's such a great debater and public speaker, you know."

"I guess?" Candace replied, after another pause. To say that she was feeling overwhelmed right now was a most certainly an understatement. For the longest time, she'd assumed that her brothers had simply been _able_ to do stuff. That was always how it seemed, at least. She'd been apparently completely ignorant to the complex work that went on in the background enabling their daily projects. "Thanks. I mean, thank you. For this and for... you know. I don't really know what to say. It's just so - so -"

Phineas smiled. "Of course. Don't worry about it. Just remember to come sign the papers this evening when you get home, and you'll be all good to go." His eyes darted from her to Jeremy and back again. "I see that I was interrupting. Well, I'll be out of your way now. Have fun."

And with that, he turned and retreated back inside the house, disappearing through the glass door, leaving her alone with Jeremy again.

"Wow," Jeremy said after moment. "That was... I have no words."

Candace had no words either. Anxieties about being overshadowed aside, her brothers still never ceased to amaze her when it came to the lengths they were willing to go for her. And they knew full well her... spending habits - if you could call them that - and were still willing to trust her with something like this? She could hardly believe it. And there was also the small fact that they had completely smoothed over the potentially very devastating mistake she had last night in consuming those supplies that didn't belong to her.

Another thought occurred to her in the midst of all this. _Here it was._ Here was the holy grail that she had been seeking out her entire life. Here was proof that her brothers were more than what met the eye. It would so easy to just walk into the house and show it off. Would the Mysterious Force act if she did so? A piece of plastic wasn't that abnormal in and of itself. But... it didn't matter. It didn't matter because she didn't want to.

She slid the card into her pocket and and turned to Jeremy. "Come on. Time's ticking, and we're burning daylight. Let's go get some ice cream."

For a moment, he didn't respond. Then he too smiled, shaking his head. "Man. Your brothers are, like... I don't even know."

Candace threw back her head and full-on laughed, for the first time since this whole mess had started, well, the day before yesterday, technically.

"Yes," she agreed. "Yes, yes we are."


	18. Epilogue

Candace's eyes popped open, and she suddenly found herself wide awake. She sat bolt upright in bed, her eyes on the digital clock hanging on the wall of her bedroom.

**12:00 AM Thurs. Sept. 22**

Instantly, her brain launched into high-alert mode. No! What was this madness?! Time had once again reset to the beginning of the last day of summer? Her breath caught in her throat and an old fear crept up again in the base of her stomach.

_No_. She told herself. _No, that's not happening. Calm down, Candace. There's no reason to freak._

Being calm and not freaking out was still not something that came easily to Candace Gertrude Flynn, but the passage of time and experience and a host of good influences had done much to help in that regard. Her eyes fell on the smaller numbers displayed on the clock beneath the day and time.

**09/22/2030**

She took a deep breath, and sat still in the bed, listening to gentle breathing coming from the sleeping form in the bed next to her. It was midnight - and she had things she needed to do tomorrow. There was no legitimate reason for her to up this at this time of night, but something pulled on her, tugging her out of bed.

Taking care to make no sound, she slid back the covers, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and felt about on the carpeted floor for her slippers. Sliding her feet into them, she stood up and crept over to the bedroom door. She turned the knob very slowly, so as not to make a sound, and silently stepped out into the hall.

Padding noiselessly through the house, she stopped to poke her head into her daughter's room. Five-year-old Amanda Flynn lay perfectly still, and completely content on her little bed. Candace couldn't help but smile. She knelt down and straightened the covers over the little girl.

"I love you." she whispered.

She wondered momentarily if her daughter would have to grow up dealing with the Mysterious Force, as she had. Well, if her daughter ever came to her one day spouting tales of miraculous things that always seemed to disappear before Candace could actually lay eyes on them, she would know. The Mysterious Force was a strange burden, but it was nonetheless hers to bear. As she'd grown up, she'd gradually become more and more used to it. With Phineas' and Ferb's help, she'd eventually memorized a long list of _Do_ 's and _Don't_ 's that could help her manage it. For the most part, it had gone rather smoothly. Even at the age of thirty-five, Candace still found herself somewhat unable show her mother anything out of the ordinary, without the Force whisking it away. Although, thankfully, the Force _had_ somewhat mellowed as Linda Flynn-Fletcher's definition of 'ordinary' gradually expanded to include more and more.

There had been one pretty bad scare - four years ago, when Amanda was just learning to walk. She'd taken her daughter over to the old house on Maple Drive (where her parents still lived) for Christmas. Her daughter had fallen asleep in the most adorable way, on Candace's old bed, which had long ago been converted into a guest bed. She'd forgotten all about the rules of the Force, and rushed downstairs to get her mother, intent on showing her. Of course, much to her horror, when she brought her back upstairs, her daughter was gone.

_That_ had been the most terrifying two minutes in her life - she'd almost had heart attack, fearing that she'd lost her daughter permanently to the strange cosmic phenomena that had plagued her since she was just a kid herself. Thankfully, however, Phineas had shown up behind her in the midst of her panic attack, wondering why Amanda had been wandering about the house unattended, with her daughter safely cradled in his arms.

He claimed that he'd been the attic, looking through old boxes of stuff, when Amanda had turned up behind him. How the then barely a year old girl had gotten up the ladder into the attic, Candace would never know. Well, she knew - it was the Force, of course.

She lingered for just a moment more in her daughter's room, before turning and quietly padding out. Something was just not right - and she couldn't lay her finger on it for some reason. She walked quietly down the stairs, guided by the soft green light of pressure-activated lights in the floor that had been set up with her own hands.

She walked across the living room, and pressed a button on the wall, causing the living room blinds to slide open, revealing the outside.

The pale moon shone down over the night sky, it's blue-tinted light glinting on the roofs of the houses across the street. The stars gleamed cold and bright against the darkness of the sky. She swept her eyes across the arc of the sky, counting in her head just how many of those stars she'd been to.

Her daughter had been born into a most unusual family, that was for sure. Even at the young age of five, she'd already been into deep space more times than most people went a lifetime. The collection of aliens that had shown up outside the delivery theater on the day of her birth had been more than testament to the fact that if nothing else, her life would at least be unique. Heck, two other versions of Candace herself had even shown up, accompanied by at least three differently-aged versions of her brothers and one adult copy of a guy who claimed he was Amanda's future son - though later Ferb had taken her aside and told her that nobody actually knew who that guy really was, or how he'd gotten in there in the first place.

It had been like giving birth in an auditorium, the hospital had been so filled with quantum duplicates. She smiled wryly to herself, sure that the nurses working that day had been driven entirely insane by people seemingly materializing in where ever they pleased. Her parents - well, they had grown _somewhat_ used to that kind of craziness by now.

Just the other day, Candace had gotten a phone from her mother asking her to come over and "get this space saucer out of my driveway! I can't open the garage door! Don't those aliens know your new address by now?"

There had been one other strange thing about the day of Amanda's birth - one thing that still puzzled Candace to this day. As all the various visitors from both out of state, outer space, and other times were stopping by to see the newborn child, a much older version of herself had stopped by the hospital bed. At first, of course, she'd assumed time travel to be the explanation.

"Congratulations," The older her had said, with a voice strangely hoarse.

"Hey," Candace had replied. "Thanks. And thanks for stopping by. What year are you from?"

"None of them," the older Candace answered. "None of them."

"What?" That had confused her. But her older self didn't give any more details. Instead, she gestured around the room and out at the hallway attached to the room, and all it's occupants. "They're your family" she said, reaching up to wipe her face. "They're your family, you know that?"

"Yes...?" Candace replied again.

The older Candace paused. "Just - never let them go. Never, alright?"

Candace's eyes opened a bit wider in confusion. "I - I don't intend to?"

"Good. And congratulations again." And with that, the older Candace had walked out of the hospital room, out into the hall and disappeared, leaving Candace thoroughly confused. And as always, when confused about things relating to the quantum mechanical, she'd called out for her younger brothers.

"Phineas! Can you come back in here for a second?"

"What's up?" he asked, stepping into the room.

"Can you get the Quantum Displacer and track the frequency of the last time traveler in this room? I really kinda want to know when they were from."

"Sure thing." Phineas had pulled out a fancy little hand-held device and played around with it for a few seconds. "Alright, the last time traveler in this room was ... nine year old me. So, that'd be from either 2012 or 2013."

"I mean the one after that," Candace had clarified. "The older me."

Phineas tilted his head slightly and sounded confused. "There's no traces of any more recent time travelers in this room. In fact, there's no traces of anybody at all more recently." He looked up at her and raised his eyebrows. "Sorry."

"That's so weird," Candace said slowly. "I know what I saw. I just know it."

"I don't know then," Phineas replied with a shrug. "Space-time continuum particles read like no one else set foot in this room after the young me." His eyes narrowed playfully. "Candace, this person - they didn't call you 'Kevin' by any chance?"

"I should smack you for that," she retorted, though in a similarly light-hearted manner.

"So you probably should." He grinned broadly. "But you're in the bed, and I'm not. So I guess it'll just have to wait."

Even thinking back on it, Candace was still unsure of what had actually happened during that time. But really didn't matter - it was five years in the past, and no harm was done anyway. And besides, it could be fun to have something which puzzled you, something you could mull over when you were feeling meditative. Maybe someday she'd give up and go back in time herself and see just what had really happened, but not today.

Candace walked over to the dresser standing against the living room wall. Opening the top drawer, she dug around in it, pushing away a stack of paperboard cards.

_Congratulations on turning thirty-five six days before your birthday,_ the top one on the stack read.

Phineas had indeed followed through on his commitment to double up on birthdays for his siblings, and every year, she received two cards and two sets of gifts, one set always exactly six days before the other.

But the SSDO cards were not what she was looking for. At last, pushed to the far back corner of the drawer, she found it. A small, silvery box, with a single red button on it, covered with a hard plastic cover. She'd realized just what it was that had woken her up at such an ungodly hour.

This was Thursday, September 22nd. It was the last day of summer. Of course, it was Thursday, September 22nd, _2030_ , thirteen years after that awful, awful time. But something about that combination of date and time on the clock still unsettled her. And sometimes her dreams still turned to nightmares of that horrid tearing sound that came from space and time being torn asunder, of that time she'd ran afoul of a version of herself gone completely off the deep end.

"Well," she said quietly to herself, trying to drive those thoughts away. "I'm _not_ a crazy lunatic with a space-time rift gun, so I guess I turned out alright." She turned the small box over in her hands. The mystery about what it did had been solved long ago. She'd reverse engineered it, and discovered that it was a sort remote signaling device, that operated on an exotic delta ray frequency. It was a call button, if you will, except it linked up with Martians and their UFO.

This was the yearly anniversary of that exact day, so many years ago, that Candace had gotten ahold of the box. The Martians had given it to her, obviously giving her a second chance to call them back, to set herself up as queen again if she so wished. She'd been back to Mars in the past thirteen years, and found the Martian civilization flourishing just as well as one would expect. They were even experimenting with space travel of their own.

Incidentally, she'd also discovered that Martians don't visibly age at all, instead, they reproduce by splitting themselves in half, similar to many single cell organisms. When Candace had been pregnant with Amanda, they had gotten wind of it some how (probably from Meap), and on their visit they had been so freaked when they saw that her child wasn't an exact duplicate of her. It had taken many long hours of explanation to successfully explain to them that although Amanda wasn't an exact genetic duplicate of Candace, she was still very much her child. It was a good thing that Meap's mustache translators worked pretty much universally.

Candace took the box in her hand, and walked over to the back door. The bio-metric trace particle detector beeped happily, and the door opened, and she stepped out into the backyard. The yard here was smaller than the one she had grown up knowing, and the tree that Candace had planted in the middle of it upon first moving here had not yet grown to be much taller than a person. Sure, she could've done any number of things to grow it instantly, but there was something satisfying about just watching it grow naturally. So slowly that you could see no difference day to day, even month to month, but you would still look at it one day and think, _When on earth did it get that big!?_ She'd only been a mother for five years, but already had done the same thing with Amanda - and her younger brother, Xavier - a surprising and slightly frightening amount of times.

Amanda's small sandbox sat next to the tree, scattered about with toys. Candace might have been inclined to tell her to clean them up, but in all honesty, it was still neater than Candace's own workbench in the garage.

Candace plopped down on the sandbox, smiling in amusement at the small sandcastle that had been erected in the middle. The engineer and creator in her saw poorly packed sand, crooked walls, and an irregular foundation - and so much room for expansion and improvement. It could be bigger, taller, cooler in almost every way. The mother in her saw only the most amazing expression of creativity that she ever seen - that seemed much more deserving of pride than all the technology that Candace had ever put together.

She smiled into the darkness, remembering the day not too long ago when Phineas had tried to 'help' Amanda with her sandcastle construction skills. Sure, while a three-story sand mansion bigger than their house was great and all, Amanda had been entirely unimpressed and was still more than content with her six inch tall mounds. Of course, she couldn't rag on her brother that much - a good portion of the upper floor of the sand castle extraordinaire had been entirely her own design.

As she sat in the sand box, she wondered just what the future held in store for her. _The future is what you make of it_ , people always said. Well, there was no better proof of that than her own travels through time. She stood up and stretched, yawning. It was midnight, after all. Turning around to head back into the house, a faint sound caught her ear, like the rubbing together of two pieces of cloth.

Candace stood still and listened intently. It was coming from the sandbox. She knelt down, and pressed her eye against one of the crooked windows in her daughter's little castle.

Inside, tiny doors slid open, and a tinier dial swung around. An elevator made of solid sand was on an endless round trip, from floor to floor, and back again.

**THE END**


End file.
